Valeria Luiselli, _Lost Children Archive_

HER THIRD NOVEL, her first written in English, and it is excellent. Three textual planes, we might say.

We have a married couple, two kids, on a Great American Car Trip from NYC to Arizona. We do not learn their names, apart from the native-inspired ones they give themselves during the trip: Pa Cochise, Lucky Arrow (the mother), Swift Feather (boy, ten, the father's son from a previous relationship), and Memphis (girl, five, the mother's daughter from a previous relationship). Both parents are sound documentarians (or documentarists, as one insists), the mother intent on getting to the southwest because she has become passionately invested in the plight of the refugee children entering the US from Mexico. The father, not native but an avid student of that history, wants to see where Geronimo lived. 

First textual plane: the mother's narration, in the foreground for the first two-thirds of the novel, focused sometimes on the kids, sometimes on the refugee children, and increasingly on her fracturing relationship with her husband. The mom is a reader, and her narration is aware of itself as a participant in  the Literary Road Trip tradition of Huck and Jim, Sal and Dean, Humbert and Lolita, but from the new perspective of wife and mother.

Second textual plane: a book the mother is reading, Elegies for Lost Children, by Elena Camposanto (but actually by Luiselli herself). The elegies are short texts that use phrases from Rilke, Pound, Eliot, et al. to depict with just a few highly lit details--a kind of chiaroscuro--a group of refugee children making their way north. These start popping up into the narrative about halfway through.

Third textual plane: When the family reaches Arizona, the ten-year-old boy and five-year-old girl light out on their own to make their way to a particular Apache site, Echo Canyon. Swift Feather, the boy, narrates these episodes, recording them into one of their mother's devices.

Why do the kids go off on their own? Luiselli very astutely leaves this open. Do they hope, by becoming refugees themselves, to become as interesting to their parents as the refugee children are? Do they feel like testing themselves the way the refugee children are being tested? do they see this as the only way they will be able to stay together since, if their parents separate, they will be separated too?

Luiselli keeps all these plates spinning skillfully, not only building up bestseller-style suspense (will the parents find the kids before they die in the desert as so many kids have?) but also, in the section titled "Echo Canyon," having the planes intersect in a way I never saw coming but that was transcendently moving.