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.