REVIEW: "DOWN BY THE RIVER" BY CHARLES BOWDEN

In the desert southwest, reality and mirage are often one in the same.
A gust of wind, and facts disappear. A downpour in a nearby mountain,
and roads fade to memories. Were they ever there? You remember them,
don't you?

Charles Bowden is at home in this flux. In his 12th nonfiction book, "Down
by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family," Bowden charts a seven-year
investigation into the murder of Bruno Jordan, an El Paso suit salesman who
wanted to be a lawyer.

The journey takes the reader through Mexico's drug cartels and into
the presidential palace. It wends through Washington and through the
bureaucracy of the war on drugs.

Bruno's brother, Phil Jordan, was a top agent with the Drug
Enforcement Administration at the time of the murder. His efforts to
solve the crime lead the reader through geopolitical plots similar to
those outlined in journalist Gary Webb's controversial work, "Dark
Alliance," which held the CIA responsible for the introduction of
crack cocaine into the United States.

Bowden is less conspiratorial and more restrained in his reach. He
shows how the drug economy in Mexico grew so powerful that it rivaled
the licit economy, tying the hands of presidents and corrupting law
enforcement and politicians on an unprecedented scale.

U.S. officials were corrupted, too, but more by politics and the hope
pinned on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Whenever Jordan's
DEA troops tried to describe the extent of Mexico's corruption, it
seemed, Attorney General Janet Reno would cut them off.

Bowden established himself as one of the country's premier "literary
journalists" with "Trust Me," a 1993 book written with Michael
Binstein about corrupt savings and loan executive Charles Keating. But
where that book was long on journalism, "Down by the River" is long on
literary devices -- sometimes more than the material can bear. Here's
a sample:

"There is a glass of water and a burning candle. I am in this black
hole, with thousands of other lost souls. I am the one who watches and
yet is incapable of doing anything. A child plays in the sunlight. The
house is cardboard and salvaged wood, the yard light brown dirt
without grass. The air sags with dust and exhaust and the sweet stench
of sewage. Electricity comes from a cord snaking across the ground
from a neighbor's house. Water is a hose from a neighbor's faucets.
The privy leans. The child works. He stands on street corners and
juggles, his face pancaked with white makeup. He is very short and
slight. Hardly anyone notices him as he juggles various balls and the
traffic stands waiting for the light to go green. On Jan. 20, 1995, a
man goes down in El Paso, Texas. His killer is arrested, tried,
convicted and sentenced to 20 years. This alleged killer is 13 years
old.

"The case is closed."

Or it isn't.

Such prose enchants at first. It's clear that Bowden is using magical
realism in the manner of novelist (and reporter) Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Bowden seeks to explain the greater psychological context of
the culture he's writing about and how that shapes the reality of the
characters' lives.

But he shifts back and forth in time and perspective so often that the
reader gets lost. After a few hundred pages of that, "Down by the
River" begins to feel like a sexy flirt who never completes the pass.