On the "Ragged Margins" of History: Burdens of Truth and National Identity in Ana Menéndez's The Last War

In her 2009 novel, The Last War, Cuban American writer Ana Menéndez constructs an authorial stand-in who consistently lacks self-insight and who serves as narrator, protagonist, victim, and perpetrator in a story about the United States in the post-9/11 period. Throughout the novel, Menéndez chronicles the experiences of a freelance photographer living adrift in Istanbul during the early years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as she debates whether to leave her marriage or join her husband who may or may not have been unfaithful to her while working in Baghdad, events that the author has revealed were based on her own life with and marriage to reporter and writer Dexter Filkins.¹ While autobiographical novels often face criticism for a number of reasons—for exposing the author's artistic laziness, for foregrounding a certain poverty of the imagination, or even for betraying the author's supposed narcissism—and while Menéndez's novel in particular could have veered into solipsism or even self-pity, the author blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction as a way of revealing the very forms of indulgence often found in such literature and as a way of laying bare various kinds of self-deception that have often shaped American identity in the early twenty-first century.²

The Last War is a story about the consequences of belated self-knowledge as the narrator resists understanding her own complicity in the demise of her ten-year marriage and in the unsettling political events unfolding around her. Reflecting on their early life together traveling abroad as "war junkies . . . endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died," the narrator recalls how the constant movements of war across the globe at first promise an escape "from the disappointments of an ordinary life," but eventually result in a troubled marriage, a stalled-out career, and an uncertain future.³ The narrator retreats into the role of Penelope, faultless in her self-sacrifice and immobility, a figure whose long-suffering devotion to duty enables a disavowal of her own capacity for betrayal and brutality. Throughout the novel, Menéndez draws connections between the decline of the marriage and growing disillusionments about the United States in the post-9/11 era, and between the narrator's flawed self-knowledge and the nation's larger myths of innocence and exceptionalism. What is often perceived to be a self-indulgent literary device thus comes to have other critical possibilities for Menéndez, who examines how strategies of evasion and dishonesty have dire consequences as a multitude of repressed truths about privilege, power, and identity surface in the narrator's life and in the larger global conflicts unfolding around her.

While Menéndez has acknowledged similarities between the plot of the novel and events in her own life, she also notes that the story soon departs from autobiography into what she calls "total invention."⁴ Like her fictional Latina counterpart whose parents moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic, Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban immigrants who settled in California in the 1960s. Like her narrator in The Last War, the author also lived and worked in Istanbul, during which time she received news about the alleged infidelity of her then-husband, Dexter Filkins. And like her novel's narrator, Menéndez once traveled the world with her husband, a reporter who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times and who wrote a critically acclaimed book based on his experiences, the title of which—The Forever War—connects meaningfully with the title of her novel, The Last War. While Filkins' title points to the ongoing tyranny of war across the ages, Menéndez's title is a bit more ambiguous. Like Filkins' text, the title may call to mind Paul Virilio's observations about the technologies of war as the driving force of modern culture. In that sense, it may refer merely to the end of just one...