The opening pages of José Skinner’s new novel The Search Committee seem to promise readers a merciless academic satire set in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. The first character introduced is a cringey assistant professor, William Quigley, originally from Minnesota and presently decked out in what he calls “his best tierra caliente outfit”—linen pants, guayabera, Panama hat, and huaraches. Quigley teaches a sophomore-level course on English-language novels about Mexico and likes to refer to his adopted home region as “Greene-land,” a nod to Graham Greene’s depictions of tropical outposts where no one can be trusted.
As we meet him, Quigley is waiting at the airport to greet a prospective departmental hire, the PhD student Minerva Mondragón, whose abstruse dissertation on the Mexican comic book series La Familia Burrón he amusingly deconstructs in his head. Then, just as we’re settled in for a spicy takedown of petty campus egos in the land of Border Studies, Skinner reveals that he has something else in mind.
Before heading back to campus, Quigley and Mondragón decide to slip across the border to the Mexican city of La Reina—a fictional stand-in for the cartel-violence-plagued Reynosa—in pursuit of a more authentic margarita. She gets kidnapped, and he gets in over his head trying to find her and bring her back without risking his tenure. Suddenly, the academic satire has shifted to a new register, taking on much heavier subject matter. It’s a risky gambit with real pitfalls to dodge, but Skinner pulls it off.
