Beyond the border

It appears on the news in cycles. The building of the wall across the U.S.-Mexico border, the swift deportation of children, migrants being teargassed and shot, the “migrant caravans.” Often, these are stories lacking in compassion and meant to inspire fear, allowing a mentality of scarcity to proliferate and the idea of unwanted others invading “our” country to run rampant.

But there are those who are trying to paint a fuller picture, trying to elevate humanity above fear. Valeria Luiselli is one of those people. Born in Mexico City, raised around the world, and now based in New York City, Luiselli is the author of five books, including “Tell Me How It Ends” (2017), which explores child migration through the lens of the 40 questions that Latin American children are asked when facing deportation. So many of us are willing to look away. But Luiselli isn’t.

Luiselli’s latest book, “Lost Children Archive,” is another attempt to reckon with the world’s growing refugee crisis as it relates to the United States. Broken into four main parts, then sections within the parts, then pieces within the sections, the novel tells the story of a couple who take a road trip with their two children, all unnamed, as their relationship is quietly unraveling. Nothing happened — no one cheated or fell in love with someone else. Instead, two paths that once converged are now diverging.

The story begins in the woman’s mind, reliving how they met through work and how they became a family four years prior, completing their unit with his now-10-year-old son and her 5-year-old daughter, who have become so close that they occasionally sleep on top of each other. The woman and the man were happy once, with the slow meticulousness of a shared routine and a knowing entry point into the other’s life. But now, as they embark on a road trip from New York City, through Apacheria, to Arizona, she senses that this may be their last trip together as a family. Later, we become immersed in the elevated mind of the boy, learning how he experiences his family and their trip together, as he documents the trip for his sister, who he is worried will be too young to remember. What becomes apparent throughout the novel’s unfolding is that even among others, we can still be lost.

During the past four years of their lives, the couple have been chasing New York City sounds through mutual jobs at Columbia University’s Center for Oral History, holding voices, laughter and languages on their recorders. “Despite the fleetingness of the encounters we had with each of [the people], or perhaps on account of that very fleetingness,” the woman muses, “we were offered an intimacy like no other: an entire life lived parallel, in a flash, with that stranger.” Their work is about recording the everyday; in that recording, the everyday becomes the exceptional because it becomes the archive. As time passes, the woman begins to recognize the stranger in herself and those she thinks she knows best.

The man is interested in documenting Chief Cochise, Geronimo and the Chiricahuas “because they’d been the last Apache leaders — moral, political, military — of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender.” The woman wants to document the crisis of refugee children at the border and how they aren’t searching for an idea of the American dream, but for safety, or at least a place that seems to have the potential to be safer than what they know. She wants to create a sound documentary about these “lost children,” in part, due to someone she meets — a woman named Manuela — whose 8-year-old and 10-year-old daughters crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with the help of a coyote but were now being held in a Texas detention center and in danger of being deported. The woman becomes involved in the case, hoping to help Manuela reunite with her daughters.

As the family drives through Virginia, then Oklahoma and Texas, seeing the abandoned gas stations, restaurants and houses in a country that says it’s already too full, Manuela’s girls are on her mind, along with the seemingly constant news of the lost children, her relationship with her husband and children, where they are going, and how stories begin and end.

There is so much truth in this novel. We learn about children journeying across the border, riding La Bestia, about how many perish in the desert. It is a story, but also a response: to the articles about migrant children and immigration crises, to literature, to nonprofits and schools doing this work, to the emptiness across the American landscape, to ideas of family, and to ideas of choice. Luiselli weaves in many texts and, in some ways, the novel is like a love letter to literature. Books are clearly an inextricable part of Luiselli’s world, and they are also an inextricable part of the woman’s world. As we read, she reads, listens to, records and remembers sentences from various texts. Books make up many of the boxes they bring on the trip. There is even a book within the book, called “Elegies for Lost Children,” that the woman reads by herself and to her son.

In the novel, it is not only the migrant children who are lost. Native peoples, like the Apaches, are seen as having been disappeared. The specter of disappearing is often on the minds of the woman and the boy, along with the idea that they may be separated from each other even before the final separation. These premonitions turn true, and it is at this point where the story becomes knotty. A bit of magical realism is introduced, and the book they are reading becomes part of the boy’s lived reality. The narrative is unhurried, even when the story line itself turns frantic. There is a sentence that goes on for pages, perhaps to bombard us with a sense of time. Luiselli is clearly an exceptional writer who knows her craft, but at points, the novel feels convoluted, as if it could be at least three stories instead of one.

Despite this, “Lost Children Archive” is a beautiful text, in which everyone is searching for connection and reconnection. There’s a lot to parse in the novel, many details in service of a bigger picture asking for more consideration, more mercy and more action.

Abigail Bereola is the books editor of the Rumpus. Her writing has appeared in GQ , the Paris Review Daily, Shondaland and Broadly. Email: books@sfchronicle.com We recommend these recently reviewed titles:

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Valeria Luiselli