Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
The only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges: this is how you cut your own nails, this is the temperature of a real hug, this is how you untangle knots in your hair, this is how I love you. And what children give their parents, in return, is something less tangible but at the same time larger and more lasting, something like a drive to embrace life fully and understand it, on their behalf, so they can try to explain it to them, pass it down to them “with acceptance and not rancor,” as James Baldwin once wrote, but also with a certain rage and fierceness. Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don’t fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.
This is a powerful book that feels important despite being, in some queasy-making ways, dissatisfying.
The story centers on a New York family that is travelling to Arizona. Husband and wife – none of the characters are named, though they give each other “Apache” names as they travel – met and fell in love while working on an NYU sponsored project to record and collect the diversity of sounds in New York. He worked mostly in the streets and buildings, recording the ambient noises of the city (he describes himself as a documentarist, like an archivist) while she recorded languages and accents of the city’s diverse linguistic communities (the husband describes her as a documentarian – akin to a librarian). Each has a child from a previous marriage – past relationships we learn almost nothing about – and they have formed a happy and close family of four.
Now that the NYC project is over, however, husband wants to move on to his dream project: recording the sounds of Apacheria – the Arizona lands that were the last stronghold of Geronimo and the Apaches. He considers their capture the end of real freedom in North America and appears willing to leave the family (taking his biological son with him) to pursue the project. The wife – who is the narrator for the first third of the novel – has become friends with a woman whose two daughters have disappeared while trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. She pitches a radio documentary focused on the crisis of refugee children crossing the desert to NPR and that gives them the opportunity to stay together as the family leaves New York for Arizona. The bulk of the novel involves their drive across country.
It is made abundantly clear however that the husband’s willingness to leave without the wife and her biological daughter foreshadow the end of the family and we read a great deal about the wife’s sadness and insecurity as they travel closer to Apacheria and the end of their lives together. They encounter a number of characters on their travels and spend some time in iconic American landscapes (The Shenandoah Valley, Graceland, Roswell) but much of this time we are getting to know them as characters. The boy is ten and the girl is five. He is serious and wants to be treated like an adult, while she is the sense of humor in the family.
The plot becomes dramatic when, in Roswell, New Mexico, the boy becomes the narrator. He has become entranced by his father’s stories about the Apache while also becoming deeply concerned with the fate of the two little girls who are missing somewhere in the desert. He has also realized that when they arrive at their destination, the family will be split up. These various threads fuse in his thinking and he and his sister run away thinking that if they make it to Echo Canyon, near where Geronimo and the last free Apaches were captured, they will find the lost girls, their parents will find them and the twin crises will be averted.
From that point on, the novel becomes a harrowing story of these two children attempting to survive as they travel hundreds of miles of Arizona desert unescorted and without any real idea of where they are going. They ride on a freight train, find small streams and springs and – improbably – survive to reach their destination. Of course, the two girls are not there, (though they do encounter a small group of refugee children also trying to cross the desert) and the crisis does not heal the family divisions.
Until the change in narrator’s, the novel has been a largely thematic exploration of displacement, separation and struggle. Luiselli’s prose is tough and musical and the mother’s reflections on the dissolving family mix beautifully with her worries about the children being held in refugee centers by the (unnamed) Trump administration. She locates this sense of loss both within American geography through the cross-country trip and within contemporary American culture through a truly impressive practice of allusion. Mother is well read and something of a music aficionado, so there are references here to Anne Carson, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, David Bowie as well as a dozen artists and film makers and a short history of the end of the Apache. There is a beautiful novel within the novel that lyrically tells the story of a group of refugees with hints of Jews escaping the holocaust and Central Americans escaping chaos and poverty.
When the ten-year old boy walking through the desert becomes narrator, much of those allusions disappear (though Bowie’s “Space Oddity” remains a central motif) and the novel changes from a thematic, abstract reflection on separation of loss to a plot driven story of an attempt to survive separation. There are moments when the children are in danger or particularly alone that are truly moving.
However, this is also the aspect of the book that is disquieting. I hate to hold up a lens of political correctness, but the novel touches upon a central political failure of America (our refusal to take our commitments to refugees seriously) on every page. Luiselli takes on the subject of real children dying in the desert while attempting to reunite with their families by having two New Yorkers cross the desert on a kind of childish lark. This provides a number of dramatic possibilities, but there is also a certain shadow of trivialization – the level of desperation that drives these two children is simply not equivalent to that driving the actual children they represent. Perhaps this can be captured with the issue of names: like the actual children, these characters remain nameless, but as part of a family game they have taken on nicknames meant to sound like Apache names. He becomes “Swiftfeather” while his sister chooses a complex string of words that is shortened to “Memphis.” It is important to link the history of Europeans stealing land from Indigenous people to the way we are closing the borders and trying to keep that land for ourselves, but I am not sure that these nicknames allow me to take that connection seriously.
The novel has a fascinating structure. In addition to the two narrators, the novel includes lists of resources the parents are consulting for their documentaries and a series of Polaroid pictures Swiftfeather takes with a camera he gets as a gift. These deepen the narrative in a way that reminded me of the news paper collages in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy of the 1930s. Like that novel, Lost Children Archive demands to be read within its political and historic context. It deserves to be taken that seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment