“Wrestling is the spectacle of excess,” wrote French literary critic Roland Barthes in his iconic 1957 essay about the sport. Anyone even casually familiar with professional wrestling knows that spectacle — the costumes, the story lines, the insults, and the chair throwing — is the point. And nowhere is this spectacle taken more seriously than in lucha libre, Mexico’s style of wrestling wherein competitors are masked, and their identities are hidden behind quasi-superhero characters like the Blue Demon or The Saint. Luchadores are either técnicos or rudos — good guys or bad — and identities and story lines are often passed down from father to son, so that the drama and the rivalries can span generations. Unlike the boxer, Barthes says, the wrestler’s job is not to win, but to play his part in a reenactment no less lofty than the struggle between good and evil.
In “The Sons of El Rey,” his first novel in a decade, Alex Espinoza plunges readers into this world of latex and sweat, contrived backstories, and very real injuries. Retired luchador Ernesto Vega, known in the ring as El Rey Coyote (King Coyote), is on his deathbed. He’s haunted by visions of his late wife, Elena, harassed by the voice of his disembodied alter ego, and tortured by memories of betrayals and mistakes. In alternating perspectives that travel back and forth in time Ernesto’s son, Freddy, and grandson, Julian, also narrate their own lives, tracing the family from the ranches of Michoacán to the glitter and poverty of Mexico City and finally to a new life and new challenges in East Los Angeles.
“Participating in lucha libre isn’t like playing baseball or football,” Espinoza writes of Ernesto’s rise to fame, as the young wrestler learns about himself and finds release in the ring. “It goes beyond simple contact sports. It embeds itself into the psyche, seeps into the blood and bones. It humbles a luchador in unimaginable ways.”
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But this new self-knowledge creates problems for Ernesto when he discovers he has feelings for someone other than his wife. The coyote, in Mexican folklore, is always a trickster, appearing to be one thing but in reality another. The good guy character Ernesto plays in the ring eventually becomes too sharp a contrast to who Ernesto believes he is — a deceitful liar — and he returns again and again to these dueling identities on his deathbed. As his success grows, so too does his estrangement from Elena, and we see this same inability to face hard truths trickle down into the second and third generation.
Freddy is unable to reach out to his son, Julian, though he desperately wants the young man’s help resurrecting the family’s shabby gym following the pandemic-era shutdown. Julian for his part is avoiding both his father and romantic commitment as he chases easy money as an escort to wealthy older men. He allows himself to be drawn into degrading encounters that grow more ironic in nature, while his grandfather lies dying a few miles away, regretting a life lived without true love.
Espinoza’s love of the sport — Mexico’s second most popular, after soccer — is evident on every page, and some of the book’s most delightful moments come when he’s giving readers a blow-by-blow, or providing background information about its intricacies. He calls lucha the “Eternal Struggle” and awards it near-mythic proportions in one chapter as he narrates its origins in the style of an Aztec creation myth. “For millennia, there was only stillness… Then, there came a loud crack, and the sky parted, and there emerged the spirit being called Te ' cnico. He of feathers and sky skin… He looked down upon the expanse of nothingness and said, ‘Is there no one here to challenge me?’”
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Espinoza carries the notion of an eternal struggle across his story lines to perfection. His characters curse, punch, piledrive, and leap from the ropes, battling themselves as much as their opponents. It’s scripted, yes, everyone knows that. But this jibes with a particular idea in philosophy known as compatibalism: that while everything in life is predetermined, we still have the free will to direct our own actions. The outcome is known — good will triumph sometimes over bad, and other times the bad guys will rule the ring. But we don’t watch to know who will win. We watch to see the lucha, the struggle, the way the bad guys cheat, the way the good guys beat their chests in agony at their defeat, and then the way the good guys train for months to prepare to fight another day.
“For us fighters,” Espinoza writes in the voice of El Rey Coyote, “it’s not about the script or about the feuds, or about who the victor is. It’s about the spectacle of it all. It’s about the struggle. Sólo la lucha.”
THE SONS OF EL REY
By Alex Espinosa
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Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $28.99
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a screenwriter and author of the novels, “Mona at Sea” and “The Bullet Swallower,” as well as the chapbook, “Five Conversations About Peter Sellers.” She teaches fiction and essay writing at Grub Street. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts. You can find her on Instagram: @unefemmejames.