Lost Children Archive

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, is an example of a book beautifully written but nonetheless annoying. While she is gifted with her prose, the characters and plot in this novel are extremely wanting, and there is a third act development that I found utterly vexing.

First, a few pet peeves. I don't like it when writers don't use quotation marks around dialogue. Quotation marks are a standard form of punctuation that clarifies things. Not using them is like not using commas. Secondly, she does not name her characters. They are a married couple and their two children, but the wife, who narrates much of the book, simply refers to her husband, the boy, or the girl. Now, I get why Luiselli does this, because later they will take names like Amerindians did, but it is still annoying.

Luiselli would seem to be trying to parallel the story of this family with that of children who are being caged at the border, and this ties in with the "lost children" theme: "Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood." A large part of the narrative is made up of a book, Elegy For Lost Children, that the mother is reading, about those children who travel on the tops of trains from Central America to the American border.

But I could never relate, because the characters are kind of awful. The mother and father are, as they describe it, a documentarian and a documentariast. Good grief. The husband makes documentaries out of sound, and is also called an "acoustemologist." They are definitely of the NPR tote-bag world, and while that is not in and of itself a bad thing, there's a certain smugness about them.

The family is taking a trip to Arizona. The father is doing something on the Apache, who were the last Indian tribe to surrender, while the mother is doing research on the children held up at the border. For some reason they take an extremely long route, not traveling by Interstate, and even getting lost in Appalachia. Movies and books about cross-country travel that does not involve the Interstate baffles me. I suppose they wanted a more picaresque route, but their dithering wasn't really explained.

The children are a boy of ten and a girl of five. They are step-siblings, but raised together. The boy seems to be of above average intelligence, but in the third act he pulls a stunt that, at least to me, comes out of nowhere, though it does tie in with the "lost" theme. But I found that Luiselli forced the boy to do this to make the plot go forward--it does not come organically. Also, he is supposed to be intelligent, for example knowing all about a turtle they visit at an aquarium, but at the end of the book there is a pages long sentence that no ten-year-old boy could think, which includes this: "the lady who is never late for work, and sips from reusable straws in order not to pollute, and sits up straight in front of the computer monitor while she listens on her earphones to an only mildly pornographic but rotundly moralistic lesbian romance novel written by author Lynne Cheney, titled Sisters, not at all oblivious to the fact that the author of the novel is the wife of the ex–vice president Dick Cheney, who, under President George W. Bush, directed “Operation Jump Start,” during which the National Guard was deployed along the border and a twenty-foot cement wall was erected across part of the desert, passing just a few miles from her office," No ten-year-old comes up with a phrase like "mildly pornographic but rotundly moralistic lesbian romance."

The major failing of this book is the pretentiousness. There is great mention of other works. The characters carry boxes of materials in the trunk, and Luiselli begins each section with a contents listing. One has Ezra Pound's Cantos, On The Road, The Lord Of The Flies, works by Cormac McCarthy and Roberto Bolano, and a music score by Phillip Glass. This just seems like showing off, or the discussions at a party of academics. Luiselli offers an interpretation of The Lord Of The Flies that makes sense in context, but David Bowie's "Space Oddity" is also a theme, and she never mentions what the song is really about: drug addiction.

But Luiselli can write beautifully. There are many passages that sparkle with terrific similes and descriptive language: "The children were playing with some marbles one had brought when a scrotum-faced woman, neck speckled with warts and stray hair, and eyes like a welcome mat on which too many shoes had been wiped, appeared out of the shadows before them and grabbed for their palms, foretelling demented bits of stories that they could not afford to hear complete."

I was with this book until the last act, which goes into familiar "children in jeopardy" mode, which to me is manipulative, because who doesn't feel for children in trouble? It's a card that is played too often, though I see why she did it, because she's comparing white privileged children with brown unprivileged children. But when this plot point is introduced I shut down and couldn't wait for it all to be over.