In the first part, the narrator is an unnamed woman who is taking a
road trip with her husband, her 5-year-old daughter (the girl), and her
10-year-old stepson (the boy). They
leave New York for south-western Arizona.
Both she and her husband are audio documentary makers; her goal is to
document migrant children gone missing while trying to enter the U.S.: “the story I need to tell is the one of the
children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they
are, possibly forever, lost.” Her
husband, on the other hand, is trying to find the echoes of the last free
Native Americans, “Geronimo and his band [who] were the last people on the
entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes.” There are indications that their marriage is
disintegrating because “their plans were too different . . . and neither wanted
to give up being who they were.”
The second part of the novel is narrated by the stepson who focuses on
an adventure he undertakes with his sister so “Ma would start thinking of us
the way she thought of them, the lost children.
All the time and with all her heart.
And Pa would focus on finding our echoes, instead of all the other
echoes he was chasing.”
There is very little plot until the second part; instead, there are
many digressions and much political commentary.
With the inclusion of things like migrant mortality reports, I often
felt like I was reading an essay.
Certainly, some passages read more like non-fiction: “When undocumented children arrive at the
border, they are subjected to an interrogation conducted by a Border Patrol
officer. It’s called the credible fear
interview, and its purpose is to determine whether the child has good enough
reasons to seek asylum in the country.”
There is often a didactic tone in sections. For instance, there is this exposition: “More than eighty thousand undocumented
children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had
been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven
months. All those children were fleeing
circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries
where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of
law. They had come to the United States
looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who
had migrated earlier and might take them in.
They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually
goes. The children were merely looking
for a way out of their daily nightmare.”
It is not just the immigration crisis that receives comments: “a landscape scarred by decades or maybe
centuries of systematic agricultural aggression: fields sectioned into quadrangular grids,
gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with
pesticides, where meagre fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields
corseted into a circumspection of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling
Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and field turned
into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and
enormous windmills.”
The author’s style is very erudite, perhaps too much so. The number of allusions is amazing; she
references Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, Jerzy
Andrzejewski, Susan Sontag, and Anne Carson, among many others. The narrator speaks of reading “Hannah
Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal.” After
a while, however, one is left with the impression that Luiselli is just trying
to impress. And then there’s the
diction; phrases like “rhetorical usufruct” and “edulcorated versions of xenophobia”
and “his prosody well attuned to the necrological hypocrisy” abound. Oh, and then there’s a 20-page sentence.
I had difficulty with the portrayal of the children. They are both terribly precocious. A 5-year-old can tell a multilingual
joke? The 10-year-old boy has a very mature
narrative voice. And a parent would
consider Lord of the Flies a good
audiobook for a family road trip with two young children?
Migrant children should have their stories told. I just don’t think that Luiselli has chosen
the best way to tell those stories. She
tries to emphasize the universality of the human experience by having nameless
characters and by drawing parallels between the treatment of the Apaches (“they
were crammed into a train car and sent . . . far from everything and everyone”)
and the migrant children, but her clever but artificial style does not evoke
the type of emotional impact one would expect.
It’s a case of good intentions but poor execution.
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