Editors Reads Verdict
The Infinite Plan is Allende's most American novel — a bildungsroman about a white man raised among Latinos in East Los Angeles who spends his life trying to escape his origins, told with the sociological breadth and emotional directness of her best work.
What We Loved
- The East Los Angeles Latino community is rendered with sociological depth and imaginative generosity
- The Vietnam sections are among the most visceral war writing in Allende's fiction
- The novel is a genuine attempt to understand a different culture from the inside — Allende's Chilean perspective illuminates what American writers might miss
- Gregory's self-deception is tracked with precision — the myth of self-invention examined critically
Minor Drawbacks
- Gregory is less sympathetic than Allende's female protagonists — the male bildungsroman is less native to her
- The novel is her longest and feels it in places — the San Francisco lawyer sections drag
- The 'infinite plan' framework (Gregory's father's pseudo-philosophy) is underdeveloped as a structural device
Key Takeaways
- → The American myth of self-invention requires abandoning the people who made you — the price is loneliness
- → Vietnam produced damage that American culture was unprepared to account for and unwilling to examine
- → Growing up as the only Anglo child in a Latino community produces a specific kind of double consciousness
- → Success as conventionally defined does not deliver the freedom it promises
| Author | Isabel Allende |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HarperPerennial |
| Pages | 384 |
| Published | January 1, 1991 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, American Literature, Coming of Age |
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Infinite Plan" about?
Gregory Reeves grows up among Latinos in East Los Angeles, serves in Vietnam, becomes a lawyer in San Francisco, and tries to outrun the poverty and violence of his childhood. Allende's first novel set in North America — a bildungsroman structured around the myth of self-invention and a portrait of the Latino community in California.
What are the key takeaways from "The Infinite Plan"?
The American myth of self-invention requires abandoning the people who made you — the price is loneliness Vietnam produced damage that American culture was unprepared to account for and unwilling to examine Growing up as the only Anglo child in a Latino community produces a specific kind of double consciousness Success as conventionally defined does not deliver the freedom it promises
Is "The Infinite Plan" worth reading?
The Infinite Plan is Allende's most American novel — a bildungsroman about a white man raised among Latinos in East Los Angeles who spends his life trying to escape his origins, told with the sociological breadth and emotional directness of her best work.
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