A common criticism of autofiction is that it doesn’t get out enough. You could see Valeria Luiselli’s teasingly autobiographical new novel, about American border crises past and present, as an attempt to square the circle, enjoying autofiction’s perks – the freedom from clunky scene-setting; the flexibility to be essayistic as well as dramatic – while avoiding accusations of solipsism by targeting an issue of unimpeachable urgency.
Taking the form of a travelogue centred on a road trip from New York City to the Mexican border, the book was begun in 2014, when tens of thousands of migrants from Mexico and Central America crossed into the US. Its unnamed narrator, who shares much in common with Luiselli herself, reflects on the ethics of storytelling while setting out to document children going missing while trying to enter America.
With her husband, a soundscape artist on his own quest to retrace the steps of the last Native Americans conquered by European settlers, she sets off with their two children from past relationships, a 10-year-old son (his) and a five-year-old daughter (hers).
Their awkward questions about refugees and the brutality of US history add energy to the wandering narrative, as do the regular bouts of marital spite, with the narrator’s husband portrayed as a pretentious blowhard who winds her up even in his sleep, “so calm in his nasty, guiltless dreams”.
The narrator, by contrast, tends to be all swooning sensitivity, imagining people in their homes “reading, sleeping, fucking, crying, watching television” as she drives by night across Arkansas. Her empathy doesn’t always survive actual human contact; in Oklahoma, she observes a mother “with a face and arms the texture of boiled chicken” feed her toddler “long fries dripped first in ketchup, then in mayonnaise” while talking about “price discounts in the local supermarket”, the child replying with “inhuman burbles and shrieks”.
When the narrator learns of a looming deportation flight, it injects longed-for impetus, but the race to intercept the plane ends only with her lashing out at a wire fence separating her from the airfield. There’s pathos here, but maybe not quite how Luiselli intends; it gets hard not to crave a bit of the chutzpah on show in a more conventional social problem novel such as Rachel Kushner’s recent The Mars Room, which simply rolls up its sleeves to brazen out the difficulty of imagining its way into prison life.
Luiselli’s more cautious approach – her narrator muses on whether she “can or should make art with someone else’s suffering” and talks us through the underlinings in her copy of Susan Sontag’s journals – may be more honest but its insights are moot, especially when the noodling ends up having to go toe to toe with the bald facts of “migrant mortality reports” inserted into the narrative, describing children found dead from exposure in the desert. When the narrator agonises over “the best way to tell the story”, you can’t help but feel Luiselli already figured it out in Tell Me How It Ends, a nonfiction book based on her experience interpreting for child migrants held by the US.
In the end, Lost Children Archive runs out of steam and has to change tack, switching perspective to the narrator’s stepson as he plans to run away, as if becoming a lost child himself might make him more interesting to his mother.
The episode might have fuelled the novel all by itself, but in selling this very different story in the shape of another, Luiselli, almost despite herself, seems to fall into the trap of thinking the personal isn’t political enough.
• Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
