Lost Children Archive: A
Novel (2019)
By Valeria Luiselli
Alfred A. Knopf,
375 pages.
✭✭✭
Lost Children Archive was long-listed for the Man Booker
Prize, which generally means that it’s either brilliant or a book only other
writers love. This time it’s a bit of both. Luiselli was under Man Booker consideration
even though she lives in New York. She was born in Mexico, and grew up in South
Korea, South Africa, and India, the latter two being British Commonwealth
nations.
The first thing
to say about the book is that it’s ambitious; the second that it’s unorthodox. Lost Children Archive is many things:
the portrait of a failing marriage, a multiple point-of-view novel, a
meditation on U.S. immigration politics, a musing on literary sources, a ghost
story, and a drama about imperiled children. It is also an exceptionally
literate book that’s often not very literary. In fact, were it not as literate
as it is, it would invite the charge that it’s really a big mess.
At the center
of the book is a nameless family of four, referenced in the book as Mama, Papa,
the boy, and the girl. The closest they come to proper names are identities
they assume during a family game; respectively they refer to each other as
Lucky Arrow, Papa Cochise, Swift Feather, and Memphis. They are on the road from
New York to the Southwest where the boy, who is 10, realizes his parents will
separate. Although both parents are in media production, they have incompatible
goals; Papa is “documentarian” and Mama a “documentarist.” Translation: He is
obsessed with recording all the sounds he encounters, but she is more of a
“chemist” who wants to use sound and stories to illumine the plight of immigrant children seeking to sneak into
the United States. Moreover, he is of Native American ancestry and is going to
the Southwest to stay in Apacheria, the land of Geronimo, the last Native to
surrender; she wishes to visit the Borderlands and return to New York. The
girl, who is 5, doesn’t realize it, but it’s likely that Papa and the boy will
remain in Apacheria, and Mama and the girl will part with them there.
The family sets
off with just the basics, plus 7 boxes for whatever collections are made along
the route, books and tapes in Papa’s boxes; tapes, maps, and writing in Mama’s.
Each child has one box. The boy becomes a Polaroid photographer whose shots
document random events; the girl collects odds and ends. Each individual
narrates chapters, though Mama has the lioness’s share. At one juncture she
laments the dangerous journey of children to the border and ponders, “Were they
to find themselves alone crossing borders and countries, would my own children
survive?” Uh oh. That line is a classic Chekov’s gun and readers immediately
know that this will turn into a more personal lost children’s tale.
As noted, it is
also a road trip, but this is no amber waves of grain/purple mountains majesty
journey. Luiselli exposes America as it often is away from its cities and
well-heeled suburbs: dusty, dirty, dangerous, and desperate. Among the untold
stories of illegal immigration is of the intolerable conditions that drive
individuals toward a land where hope American-style is on life support. In one
of the novel’s more lucid passages Luiselli writes of child immigrants, “They
weren’t looking for the American Dream…. The children were merely looking for a
way out of their daily nightmare.”
Luiselli’s
novel is timely and often poignant, but it’s an open question if she’s also overly
enamored with trying to write an “important” book. Interspersed with an already
loose narrative are oblique references to everyone from Ezra Pound, Rilke, and
Homer to Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Galway Kinnell, and Juan Rolfo. In the
afterword Luiselli tells us that her work is “built of a dialogue with many
different texts, as well as with other nontextual stories…. [It] is both an
inherent and visible part of the central narrative” whose references and
materials, “function as intralineal markers that point to the many voices in
the conversation that the book sustains with the past.” Okay, that’s just
intellectual posturing!
Lost Children Archives works best when Luiselli seeks clarity
and coherent narrative; it goes astray when she tries to channel her inner
Susan Sontag. She has written what is sometimes a deeply moving examination of
identity in modern America, but is too often a monologue delivered into a
mirror. Luiselli is aware of, but does not clearly articulate, the ultimate
irony of the immigration crisis: the horse has already left the barn. By this I
mean that the United States is a multicultural and increasingly non-white
society whether or not anyone likes it. Put another way, the targets of
ethnocentrism and xenophobia conform to the old Pogo cartoon quip, “We have met
the enemy and he is us.”
I was glad that
I read this book, but I think it wise that the Man Booker committee dropped
this one from prize consideration. Lost
Children Archive is too ambitious for its own good. Ultimately too much is
stuffed into those 7 boxes and Luiselli is forced to jettison the one thing all
novelists need: deep connection to their readers.
Rob Weir
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