What distinguished Carlos Fuentes's impressive first novel, "Where the Air Is Clear," was precisely his ability to manage firmly and sensitively—always as an artist, never as an ideologist—the kind of packed and turbulent social scene that is so often the undoing of the "political" novelist. Taking as his material the passionate revolutionary past and critically-poised present of Mexico, he brought to it with the grace of a true novelist an instinct for the decisive point at which personal destiny meets historic circumstance, illuminating history in human terms and making of abstract ideas the vital tissue of dramatic event and encounter. We too often confuse politics with polemics, forgetting that the great masters were in an important sense political novelists and that the genre remains an eminently viable one. Whatever we may think, it is a genre that proposes itself compellingly to writers who are themselves participants...