SOURCE: Kenan, Randall. “Miami Vice.” Nation 252, no. 24 (24 June 1991): 856-58.

In the following review of Sayles's novel Los Gusanos, Kenan praises the author's story of Miami's Cuban exile community, acknowledging some difficulties with the overly complicated narrative.

“Forgive me, my friend,” says Don Quixote near the end of Cervantes's epic, “for having caused you to appear as mad as I by leading you to fall into the same error, that of believing that there are still knights-errant in the world.” But that vision of chivalry didn't die with the old crusader; today its adherents tote submachine guns and high explosives, or so John Sayles tells us in his updated chronicle of dreamers of the impossible dream in his new novel Los Gusanos (The Worms).

Sayles's early work established him as a troubadour of the grotesque. From his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, he demonstrated a healthy sense of...