The Infinite Plan

The Infinite Plan Review

The Infinite Plan was published in 1991 and marks a significant departure in Allende’s work: her first novel set in North America, her first with a male protagonist, and her most sustained engagement with the United States as a subject rather than as a point of reference. The novel is based on the life of her partner William Gordon, and the personal investment shows — for better and worse — in the directness with which it pursues its material.

Gregory Reeves grows up among Chicano families in East Los Angeles, the son of a charismatic but unreliable Anglo preacher who has invented a home-made philosophy called “The Infinite Plan.” His childhood is marked by poverty, by his father’s instability, and by his education within a Latino community that adopts him without fully making him one of its own. This double positioning — Anglo by race, Latino by formation — is the novel’s most interesting premise, and Allende handles it with the sociological curiosity she brings to unfamiliar worlds.

The Vietnam sections — Gregory enlists, serves in combat, returns damaged — are the novel’s most viscerally effective writing. Allende brings to the war the perspective of someone for whom American exceptionalism is not a default assumption, and her account of the war’s violence and the soldiers’ psychological exposure is correspondingly unsparing. The damage Gregory carries back has no name and no cultural framework to contain it; the America of the late 1960s and 1970s is not yet equipped to understand what it has done to the young men it sent.

The novel’s second half, in which Gregory becomes a San Francisco lawyer and pursues the material success that the American myth promises, is the least compelling section — partly because Gregory in success is less interesting than Gregory in crisis, and partly because the novel’s argument (that self-invention without self-knowledge produces emptiness) is by this point well established. The strengths are the early sections, the war, and the portrait of the East Los Angeles community that formed him.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Allende’s most American novel — not her strongest, but an essential demonstration of her range and her capacity to inhabit a culture not her own.

Allende Turns to America

Published in 1991, The Infinite Plan marks a genuine departure in Allende’s work: her first novel set in North America, her first built around a male protagonist, and her most sustained treatment of the United States as a subject in its own right rather than a point of distant reference. The book is based on the life of her partner, William Gordon, and the personal investment registers — for better and for worse — in the directness with which it pursues its material. Gregory Reeves grows up among Chicano families in East Los Angeles, the son of a charismatic but unreliable Anglo preacher who has invented a homemade philosophy he calls “The Infinite Plan.” His childhood is shaped by poverty, by his father’s instability, and by an education inside a Latino community that adopts him without ever fully making him one of its own. This double positioning — Anglo by race, Latino by formation — is the novel’s most interesting premise, and Allende approaches it with the sociological curiosity she brings to any unfamiliar world.

Vietnam Without Exceptionalism

The novel’s most viscerally effective writing belongs to its Vietnam sections, in which Gregory enlists, serves in combat, and returns damaged. Allende brings to the war a perspective for which American exceptionalism is not a default assumption, and her account of the violence and the soldiers’ psychological exposure is correspondingly unsparing. The damage Gregory carries home has no name and no cultural framework to contain it; the America of the late 1960s and 1970s is not yet equipped to understand what it has done to the young men it sent to fight. This is among the most powerful war writing in Allende’s fiction precisely because it refuses the consolations that a native chronicler of the conflict might have reached for, and it gives the novel’s central argument — that self-invention without self-knowledge produces emptiness — its hardest and most concrete test.

The Limits of Self-Invention

The novel’s weaker half is its second, in which Gregory becomes a San Francisco lawyer and chases the material success the American myth promises. The drag is partly a matter of character — Gregory in success is simply less interesting than Gregory in crisis — and partly a matter of argument, since the novel’s thesis is well established by this point and the later sections largely confirm what the reader already understands. Gregory is also a less sympathetic figure than Allende’s female protagonists; the male bildungsroman is not her native form, and the “Infinite Plan” framework inherited from his father remains underdeveloped as a structural device. Yet the novel earns its place in her body of work as a demonstration of range and of her capacity to inhabit a culture not her own. Its strengths — the richly imagined East Los Angeles community, the searing Vietnam sequences, the critical anatomy of the myth of self-making — make The Infinite Plan an essential, if not a first-rank, Allende novel: the work in which a Chilean writer turned her gift for sociological breadth and emotional directness onto the United States and found there a subject worthy of it.

Double Consciousness and Its Price

The most resonant idea in The Infinite Plan is its portrait of double consciousness — the specific condition of a child who is Anglo by race but Latino by formation, adopted by a community that never quite makes him its own. Gregory Reeves belongs fully to neither world, and Allende treats this in-between position as the source of both his adaptability and his lifelong restlessness. The American myth of self-invention that he chases requires, the novel argues, the abandonment of the very people who made him, and the price of that abandonment is loneliness: success as conventionally defined delivers none of the freedom it promised. Allende’s outsider perspective — a Chilean writer anatomising the United States — lets her see the cost of self-making with a clarity that a native chronicler might have missed, and it is that clear-eyed scrutiny of the national myth, more than any single plot turn, that gives the novel its lasting interest.