Lost Children Archive Both Moves and Sputters

Lost Children Archive: A Novel (2019)

By Valeria Luiselli

Alfred A. Knopf, 375 pages.

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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