This book was written in 1991, a few years after Allende married her second husband, a San Francisco attorney. She mentioned in her memoir My Invented Country that The Infinite Plan was a story about her husband.
The main character, Gregory Reeves, is four years old when the book begins near the end of World War II, the son of an Australian itinerant preacher (of a New-Age-y “Infinite Plan”) and a Russian Bahai mother. The father falls ill while they are in the Los Angeles barrio, so Greg grows up there, speaking Spanish, practicing a type of Catholicism, and earning money from a young age. Thanks to a small inheritance from a librarian friend, Greg attends Berkeley during the 60’s (with all the requisite drugs and sex). He studies law, marries a vapid blonde heiress and fathers a daughter, who later becomes a drug addict. In real life, Allende's husband's daughter dies from a drug overdose about the same time as Allende's daughter from her first marriage, Paula, dies from porphyria.
Greg learns of his first wife's frequent infidelities during a spouse-swapping game and shortly after leaves for Vietnam for his obligatory military service (he was in the ROTC in college), at the height of the war. When he returns, a different man, he establishes a very successful practice and lives a life of excess. It takes a malpractice suit and a little help from his friends to straighten him out by the end.
This was Allende’s first book set in the United States, and it is clear she did a lot of research on her new home. The weakest part are the events set in Vietnam; Greg’s ability to make friends with the villagers he is spying on does not ring true. I found her characterizations of the women in the book, particularly Carmen Morales, Greg’s childhood friend, and Olga, a part of his family from his itinerant childhood, to be stronger than any of the men. This book has a little bit of everything – besides the previously-mentioned drugs and sexual games of the 60s and 70s, Greg is raped as a boy by a barrio bully, his sister is a victim of incest, and Carmen has a botched abortion and later adopts her dead brother’s half-Vietnamese son.
It’s an interesting book, but probably not one of Allende’s better ones.
