Books February 4, 2019 Issue

Writing About Writing About the

Border Crisis
Valeria Luiselli’s intricate novel, “Lost Children Archive,” confronts the complexities of bearing
witness.

By James Wood
January 28, 2019
Luiselli’s formal experiments wrestle with the role of traditional literary authority in a novel of political
activism. Photograph by Geordie Wood for The New Yorker

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n the summer of 2014, the writer Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico but
I resident in New York and awaiting the arrival of her green card, went on a
road trip. A privileged immigrant, on the lintel of legality, she set out with her
husband and their two children for Cochise County, Arizona, near the border
with Mexico. While driving through Oklahoma, the family began to hear news
of a crisis: unaccompanied children, most fleeing violence and intimidation in
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, were turning up at the border in sizable
numbers—eighty thousand between October, 2013, and June, 2014. The
majority of them had made unspeakably dangerous journeys, riding on a freight
train known as La Bestia. Desperate to reach relatives in the United States, they
would first have to surrender to the Border Patrol, in order to begin the long,
fraught, uncertain process of legal accommodation. They were child refugees. “It
is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest
aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born,” Luiselli
observes.

Less than a year later, back in New York, Luiselli volunteered as an interpreter
at a federal immigration court. At Hofstra University, where she taught in the
Romance-studies department—she has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from
Columbia—she watched with pride as her students formed an advocacy group
to help newly arrived teen-age immigrants. Yet Luiselli also knows that what
writers do best is write: the moving nonfiction account of her journey to the
border and her involvement with the immigration system, “Tell Me How It
Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” (2017), is also an achievement of activism.
The subtitle refers to the forty questions of the standard intake questionnaire
for undocumented children; the title gestures at children’s habitual questioning
of parents, and the difficulty of telling a story whose apparent ending—safe
arrival in New York, say, after the long journey from Central America—is only
another difficult beginning. One of the stories Luiselli tells is about two sisters
from Guatemala, ages five and seven, who have turned up in the New York
courtroom. They want to reach their mother, who lives on Long Island. Before
they left Guatemala, their grandmother, having failed to get the girls to learn
their mother’s ten-digit telephone number, sewed it onto the collars of their
dresses. Now they are in New York, and have received a court summons, a
Notice to Appear. One story has ended, and another is beginning.

“Tell Me How It Ends” is all the more moving because Luiselli is so honest
about the difficulties of writing these stories. There is the difficulty of her own
proximity to and distance from the people she helps and writes about, a fact
that she foregrounds by topping and tailing her book with her own beginning
and ending: an application for a green card, and her receipt of the precious
document. We know how her story ends. This political difficulty is, at the same
time, a literary dilemma. What does activist writing, writing that wants to make
a real difference, look like? How does the privileged author—when she moved
from one country to another as a child, it was as the daughter of a Mexican
ambassador—gather the stories of impoverished others and not commit theft?
One response to these questions is properly circular: admit the questions,
highlight the difficulty, so that you’re at least not trying to hide anything.
Another response is the disavowal of traditional literary authority: just as there
are many stories, so, too, are there many ways of narrating them and thus, by
implication, many authors. And perhaps this disavowal implies a modesty about
political efficacy; a writer can do only so much, after all. A literary intervention
is literary. On the other hand, the literary is what a writer does. “Perhaps the
only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and
recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to
haunt and shame us,” Luiselli reflects. Although it is a short book, “Tell Me
How It Ends” pulses with such questions and answers, and is strengthened by
them.

n the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it
“I over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it
must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated
many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many
different minds.” These sentences are also from “Tell Me How It Ends,” but
they could just as easily have appeared in “Lost Children Archive” (Knopf ),
Luiselli’s new novel, which offers a fictionalized version of the material in her
previous book—the author returning, in a different mode, to the same stories,
and struggling with herself and her medium even more productively than in
“Tell Me How It Ends.” The shape of her 2014 journey, and a number of the
details, remain unchanged. The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman, who
with her unnamed husband and their two children—a five-year-old girl, who is
the woman’s daughter from a previous relationship, and a ten-year-old boy, who
is the husband’s son, also from a previous relationship—is driving, in the
summer, from New York City to the southeast corner of Arizona. The mother
and father are not writers, exactly; they are documentary makers, of a kind, and
met while working on a large audio-recording project, which aimed to make a
soundscape of emblematic New York noises—subways screeching, ministers
preaching, cash registers shutting, playground swings swinging. In Arizona, they
plan to do different, adjacent things: she will work on “a sound documentary
about the children’s crisis at the border”; he intends something vaguer and more
abstract: to make what he calls an “inventory of echoes” about “the ghosts of
Geronimo and the last Apaches.”

The first part of Luiselli’s novel concerns the journey south, and is written
diaristically. The text is divided into small sections of a few paragraphs, each
with its own title (some of which recur), such as “Archive,” “Narrative Arc,”
“Time & Teeth,” “Foundational Myths,” and so on. Readers of contemporary
autofiction will recognize the form: plot is relaxed into essay, with room for
authorial digression, political and theoretical commentary, and reports on what
the author has been reading, along with just enough storytelling to keep the
novel moving forward.

As in the previous work, the narrator thinks hard about her project, about its
possibility and its propriety: “Political concern: How can a radio documentary
be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic
problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of
storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? . . . Constant
concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who
am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I
too angry . . . ?” Throughout the narrative, Luiselli finds analogues for her own
literary processes. In a bookshop in Asheville, North Carolina, she overhears a
book club discussing a work that sounds as if it might be treading on the heels
of the one we are reading: “I think it’s more about the impossibility of fiction in
the age of nonfiction, says a soft-spoken woman whose contribution passes
unacknowledged.” A bit later, the narrator tells us that she likes the
photographs of Emmet Gowin, in part because “he takes his time looking at
things instead of imposing a point of view on them.” Her daughter tells her that
her school has taught her to invent by drawing four squares, labelled Character,
Setting, Problem, and Solution. “Bad literary education begins too early and
continues way too long,” her mother thinks. The family starts listening to an
audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” but the voice is merely that of
“an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person
reading.”

This section of “Lost Children Archive,” like a growing number of

contemporary works of fiction, evidences an impatience with traditional realist
artifice and convention. Characters are nameless; dialogue is not flagged as
such; dramatic “conflict” is kept to a minimum, and only faintly shaded in when
it occurs; the self-reflexive narrative stops and starts, riffs and turns in on itself.
But such formal radicalism is inevitably in search of its own realism. You can
see why Luiselli would want this chastened, self-conscious, documentary
veracity. The immediacy of the human suffering at the border, the delicacy of
how to provide witness—these are good reasons to proceed with skepticism
about narrative contrivances. So the novel, like Emmet Gowin’s photographs,
takes its time rather than quickly imposing a point of view; unlike McCarthy’s
actor, it inhabits its material naturally rather than performing it too strenuously.

he results are often engrossing. For about a hundred and eighty pages, we
T are with the family, inside their 1996 Volvo wagon, or looking over their
shoulders as they eat in diners and stay in motels and rented cabins. The
children may be unnamed, but they are utterly alive, hurling questions (What is
a refugee?) and mangling adult signals. Who, the daughter asks, is this “Jesus
Fucking Christ” her parents invoke so often? When they stop at Graceland, at
the Elvis Presley Boulevard Inn, she looks at a portrait of Elvis: “Is that Jesus
Fucking Christ, Mama?” The book offers a beautiful and patiently loving
portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. The narrator remarks,
at one point, that parenthood “seems at times like teaching an extinct,
complicated religion. There are more rituals than rationales behind them.” It is
a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s generous family cult. The kids may
wonder, “Are we there yet?,” but the reader is happy to prolong the journey.

And just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a

comprehensive literary intelligence sorting through a lot of data. She thinks, of
course, about belonging and not belonging, and about borders and the dead; she
defines a child refugee as “someone who waits”; she notes the way, at night, “the
light from the parking lot frames the curtains in a whiskey orange.” In the car,
father and mother decide that “The Road” is too bleak for the children, but they
can’t escape it: each time the narrator’s phone is reconnected to the car speakers,
a glitch causes the first line of McCarthy’s novel to play: “When he woke in the
woods in the dark and the cold of the night . . .” They choose, instead, “Lord of
the Flies” as their audiobook, a novel that, with “The Road” and Juan Rulfo’s
“Pedro Páramo,” perhaps makes a troika of patron texts, guiding and drawing
this novel onward: lost children (Golding), a last child (McCarthy), and the
ghosts of the dead (Rulfo).

This is indeed an intensely allusive novel. Our narrator has brought books with
her—by Daša Drndić, Arlette Farge, Jerzy Andrzejewski—and she makes use
of them. A wonderful section has the narrator reading Susan Sontag’s journals,
noticing phrases that have been underlined, unsure in one instance whether she
or her husband did the marking. Alongside these actual authors is an invented
one. The narrator tells us that she has brought with her the only work of an
Italian writer named Ella Camposanto (1928-2014); the book, called “Elegies
for Lost Children,” is a series of texts, set in unnamed lands, about children
trying to make their way, atop trains but also on foot, through jungle and desert,
toward the “big city” of their dreams. The narrator starts reading these densely
wrought “elegies,” which are reproduced in the book. But Camposanto (the
name was perhaps inspired by the title of a collection of essays by W. G.
Sebald) is Luiselli’s invention—such whorled maneuvers are crucial to Latin
American fiction, to say nothing of the age-old postmodernism of Spanish
literature.

Given the novel’s sheer quantity of allusions, some readers may feel that one
kind of artifice has been banished only for another to come in through the
library door. But the intellectual amplitude and the moral seriousness are
fortifying and instructive, and a solid realism undergirds most of the
bookishness: this is a plausible picture of an intellectual at work—the character
within the novel, and the author outside it. A deeper concern is that Luiselli’s
literariness encourages explicit commentary at the expense of achieved creation.
There is too much talk about archives, inventories, echoes, ghosts. Thematic
layers thicken like rain clouds. The husband’s research on the Apaches is
integrated deftly enough—the last free Americans; one of the nation’s first
deportees—but its raison d’être seems too brightly coherent, like matching one’s
shoes and coat.

The book’s weaknesses in traditional evocation more generally revolve around

the husband, a dimly realized creature who alternates between lecturing the
children on the destiny of the Apaches and quarrelling, for no apparent reason,
with his very appealing wife. This might not matter—plenty of vivid
autofictions are strung out along the quivering elastic of a single authorial ego
—were it not that the book’s central story line concerns the breakup of the
narrator’s marriage. The couple had already become somewhat estranged back
in New York City; the husband’s Apache project, for which, he announces, he
will need to spend a couple of years in the Southwest, was a warning shot.
Being forced to sit next to each other for hours at a time inside a speeding box
does little for their relations. At night, in hushed voices, they argue fiercely, but
what they fight about remains vague, Luiselli preferring commentary on marital
estrangement to its actual staging:

My husband and I quarrel on our own bed. A routine exchange: his poisonous adjectives
whispered sharply across his pillow to mine, and my silence like a dull shield in his face. One
active, the other passive; both of us equally aggressive. In marriage, there are only two kinds
of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.
And that’s it, as far as content goes. Still angry, the narrator leaves their room,
and ends up at Dicks Whiskey Bar, where she meets a handsome man in a
white tank top and jeans. Revenge sex scents the air. But, in the end, nothing
much happens; the two mainly talk—a verisimilitude that I appreciated rather
more than the narrator’s superfluous analysis of why they mainly talk. “Hard to
explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an
unbeautified portrait of their lives,” she tells us. “But perhaps also easy to
explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably
there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before
they go back to wherever they’ll sleep that night.” Drama—true fictive artifice
—does such underlining in invisible ink; that’s the secret of its beautiful
enigmas.

s the family heads south, “Lost Children Archive” begins to make good on
A its title. Husband and wife have brought archives with them—boxes of
books and audio recordings—and are seeking, once they reach the border, to
gather new material. (From those boxes, Luiselli’s novel reproduces documents,
maps, and photographs, along with bibliographies.) But only gradually does the
narrator’s project begin to shape itself around the stories of lost children. Back
in New York City, she met a woman named Manuela, who told her about her
two daughters, eight and ten, who had recently arrived in the country and were
being held in a detention center in Texas. At the New York immigration court,
she helped Manuela with translation. The searing detail from “Tell Me How It
Ends,” about the telephone numbers sewn into the dresses, appears again in this
fictionalized version of the story.

While the narrator and her family are travelling across Arkansas, she gets a
phone call from Manuela. She has lost her case; her daughters are due to be
deported. But the girls have disappeared, somewhere between detention centers
in New Mexico and Arizona. Manuela is sure that they are making their way
toward her. What, the narrator asks Manuela, can she do? She can look for
them in New Mexico and Arizona. So the narrator’s journey, precarious and
provisional, begins to find its center of gravity. She realizes that the story she
must tell is “of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer
be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost.” It’s brave of Luiselli to have
taken almost the entire first half of her novel to enact the slow, exploratory
discovery of what now becomes an urgent theme; it feels patiently lifelike. But,
having revealed the emphasis, she once again underscores a little too explicitly
and analytically what is already clear:

What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their
march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread. . . . There are many other
children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers.
There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally,
there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now
always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes,
riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.
She’s referring to the imaginary games she can hear her kids playing in the back
seat, and from these fantasies she learns another lesson. It is they who should
tell the story of the lost children: “They’ve been telling it all along, over and
over again in the back of the car, for the past three weeks. . . . I realize now,
perhaps too late, that my children’s backseat games and reenactments were
maybe the only way to really tell the story of the lost children.”

“Maybe the only way to really tell the story”—it’s like watching someone
trapped in a door frame. Authorial authority is disavowed at the very moment it
is asserted. Yet what can it mean, in a book of such diligent hesitation, to “really”
tell any story? The second half of Luiselli’s novel is largely handed over to the
narrator’s children. Now the ten-year-old boy assumes the book’s narration, and
recounts a desperate adventure. Troubled by his parents’ disunity and pessimistic
about the family’s future, the boy decides to become as important to his parents
as are the mythical “lost children” of the mother’s research—by becoming a lost
child himself. And, of course, he will also find Manuela’s lost children. One
morning, brother and sister sneak out of the cabin where the family is staying
and set out into the desert. What ensues is a gripping and somewhat fantastical
tale, in which these fortunate children undergo some of the trials of the truly
lost children—brother and sister get separated, the heat bears down, they have
nothing to eat, they are forced to ride between the cars of a train, as if on La
Bestia itself.

As this complex novel turns, the back-seat kids are the ones who must tell the
story of the lost children, but, of course, they cannot “really” tell that story; all
they can do is perform—imaginatively inhabit—the brutal hardships of others
less fortunate. In this regard, the narrator’s kids merely enact the dilemmas of
the narrator. The narrator’s “lost” children also, perforce, enter the fictional
world of the children described by Ella Camposanto, which is to say, Valeria
Luiselli. It is as if they were starring, painfully, in their own elegy, a beguiling
mixture of the real and the doubly invented.

It is impossible not to admire the novel’s surging ambition. But this is also an
oddly symptomatic book, characteristic of our age’s self-doubts, divided
between the quotidian realism of diaristic autofiction and the magical privileges
of unfettered fiction-making (the kids in the desert, Ella Camposanto’s texts).
What is missing—the absence is surely intended—is, precisely, the middle: an
artifice bold enough to invent and evoke the day-to-day specificities of people
whose lives are very different from our own, and whose hardship seems almost
unreachable. Oddly, such stories hardly appear in this passionately engaged
book. Evidence that the scrupulous realization of such otherness is compatible
with original and serious fiction-making can be found in recent novels by Jenny
Erpenbeck (African migrants in Germany) and Rachel Kushner (a women’s
prison in California). Luiselli, more playful than either of these writers, has, in
this brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising book, honored her own
difficult injunction: “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it
develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.” The story hasn’t ended yet—far from
it. ♦
Published in the print edition of the February 4, 2019, issue, with the headline “Search
Party.”

James Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2007, teaches at Harvard. His latest
book is “Serious Noticing,” a collection of essays.

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