Refried Beans.

The Years with Laura Diaz, by Carlos Fuentes (Farrar, Straus, 516 pp., $26)

Carlos Fuentes has benefited from a kind of literary affirmative action: He is Mexico's best-known novelist and therefore considered its most talented and accomplished, with an oeuvre that is important because it is . . . important. However, any talent he previously showed has slipped badly, and he is now in decline.

In The Years with Laura Diaz, Fuentes has produced a politically correct female equivalent to his most famous work, The Death of Artemio Cruz, published in the U.S. in 1964. Artemio Cruz was a brilliantly nuanced chronicle of modern Mexico through the life of a single character, a veteran of the Revolution who becomes corrupted by the success of the revolutionary elite. But despite the author's leftist sympathies, Artemio Cruz was by no means ideologically simplistic, since Fuentes's goal was to examine Mexican reality critically. He now seeks merely to burnish the self-image of the Mexican cultural elite.

Ostensibly, The Years with Laura Diaz presents a look at Mexican history from 1905 to 1972 through the life of a female lumpen intellectual-an associate of the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo who eventually emerges as a successful photographer in her own right. It soon becomes clear, however, that Fuentes is much less concerned with an exploration of Mexican life than with a reaffirmation of leftist cliches. The book opens in Detroit in 1999, where the heroine's great-grandson has gone to film a television documentary on one of Rivera's murals. Wandering in the ghetto and photographing its denizens, "insolently, idly, provocatively," he is predictably mugged. As if such a violent public attack on a foreigner were more common in Detroit than in Mexico City.

The narrative follows the eponymous heroine from her childhood in a well-off Mexican family through her adolescence in a landscape familiar to readers of "magical-realist" works such as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When she reaches adulthood, some real figures from Mexican cultural history appear, and when she gravitates to the circle of Rivera and Kahlo, she begins her artistic career. But after she marries Juan Francisco Lopez, a trade-union leader, the book becomes an increasingly talky affair. Successive historical dramas-the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the exodus of North American Communists to Mexico, the shooting of radical students in 1968-serve mainly as pretexts for wooden conversations, strung together to approximate a lifetime. The timeline is alleviated by uninspired meditations on the decline of Laura's passion for her husband and the depressing quality of her affairs with other men, and by family vignettes of little vigor: The generations die, and Laura mourns somewhat halfheartedly.

Much is missing from this book-indeed, everything that would have made it an authentic chronicle of Mexican reality. Unlike Artemio Cruz, which successfully accounted for the range of human experiences in the revolutionary epoch from the bottom to the top of society, this is essentially a party-line history of Mexico as seen only from the capital and in the minds of its leftist elite. In this legendary place, Mexican intellectuals are heroes of cultural resistance against North American vulgarity and stupidity, and protectors of the diminishing revolutionary tradition.

Laura's biography includes more than a few borrowings from those of Fuentes and Kahlo, a feminist icon worldwide. But as in his other recent books, Fuentes has not done his homework. Like his novel The Old Gringo, based on the life of Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1914, Laura Diaz is replete with anachronisms, gaffes, and legendry. When this book came out in Spanish, the Mexican critic Jose Emilio Pacheco noted that "although Fuentes has read everything and naturally knows the correct dates," people are said to read various books and dance to popular tunes years before they are composed. Other instances involve revisionism disguised as historical novelizing. Thus Laura's lover, Harry Jaffe, a self-exiled Hollywood radical, complains that the Communist actor John Garfield "wasn't guilty of anything. But they accused him of everything, of signing petitions in favor of Stalin during the Moscow purges." However, Garfield did in fact put his name to a statement by "American progressives" endorsing the Moscow trials, published on April 28, 1938, in the Daily Worker.

Even stranger is Fuentes's treatment of one of the main elements in the biography of Rivera and Kahlo, and arguably one of the most dramatic episodes in Mexican history: the arrival of Trotsky in Mexico City as the guest of the artistic couple in 1937, followed by his assassination in 1940. Although Laura is in and out of the Rivera-Kahlo studio, and Fuentes's strawmen argue in a bloodless sort of way over the morality of Stalinism, the Russian heretic is only mentioned as an abstraction. This is peculiar when one considers that Trotsky was under the protection of leftist president Lazaro Cardenas, and that the Mexican Communists were permanently stigmatized because of their involvement in the case.

If Fuentes really wants to examine the history of the Mexican intelligentsia as he once did that of the revolutionary veterans, he would have to return to the issue he addressed in his first novels: the corruption of the whole of civil society by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Their sleaze appears in this narrative through Laura's husband, whose trade-union militancy gives way to bureaucratic banality, and through her children, who work for crooked government agencies. Laura confesses to herself that her husband is "corrupt . . . mediocre . . . an ambitious man unworthy of his ambition." But unlike him-and unlike the fictional Artemio Cruz, who also is morally destroyed by the "institutionalization of the revolution"-Laura remains pure and unsoiled.

Obviously, Laura Diaz is intended to symbolize hope in the Revolution, a bright alternative of conscience. But this is profoundly dishonest: In the real Mexico it was the leftist Lauras who became corrupted first, even before the revolutionary leadership lost its elan. Selling out their creative independence in return for a secure income, they fluttered back and forth through art galleries, magazines, government ministries, faculties, publishing houses, and diplomatic postings, under the patronage of the PRI. That's why Mexico City today has more than 25 daily newspapers-to make work for all those high-minded, leftist, gringo-hating writers on the government dole. That's also how Fuentes himself landed a posting as ambassador to France from 1975-77.

This novel is as short on character development as it is long-very long-on ideology. There's tons of kindergarten Marxism here: extensive discussions of the ins and outs of Mexican radical politics, and (inaccurate) gossip about the leaders of the Spanish Republic. Many of the pseudohistorical references will go unrecognized by younger Mexican readers, to say nothing of those north of the border, for whom, ultimately, this book seems to have been intended. After all, Mexicans are no longer greatly excited by Fuentes, or by Frida Kahlo for that matter; her museum in the capital attracts only foreign tourists.

That's part of the pathetic fallacy of the highbrow historical romance. Readers enjoy the belief that they are learning something while ploughing through cliched sex scenes, and that the past was just as they imagined it-a bad imitation of a Rivera mural, full of good guys and bad guys. But Fuentes has added something distinctively rotten to this recipe. In progressing from Artemio Cruz to Laura Diaz, he has moved from an honest confrontation with the mess that was made of the Mexican Revolution to a dishonest masquerade that seeks to prettify the tragedy. It is doubtful that his American readers will realize that they have in their hands a cultural artifact as artificial and discredited as one of Frida Kahlo's admiring portraits of Stalin.