Lost Children’s Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli (review)

The child migrant crisis along the southern US border has been a fixture of news headlines for several years now, taking on a renewed urgency since the implementation of the Trump administration’s destructive policies. The public performs ritualistic outbursts of rage when the most inhumane details emerge, but attention is soon diverted when the next catastrophe surfaces. The image of children locked in cages has become part of the tapestry of modern American life, a crisis nested within a crisis competing with a multitude of other crises for our fragmented attention. We express outrage and implore leaders to take bold action, but little has changed even after years of protest. Paralysis has become the new normal.

The child migrant crisis haunts Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children’s Archive like a ghost, from the protagonist’s preoccupation with the detention of the children of Manuela, an undocumented migrant she is helping to navigate the legal system, to the interspersed stories of Elegies for Lost Children, by fictional Italian author Luisa Campobello. After several years spent recording the sounds of New York City for a university project, the protagonist’s husband decides to upend their lives, traveling to Arizona to research Apache history. Although she is certain that he wants to travel alone, she tags along anyway in hopes of locating Manuela’s children, dragging along her stepson and daughter, ages ten and five. Little drives the plot in the first half of the novel; Luiselli instead presents a character study in which we learn about Manuela, how the protagonist met her husband, and how their marriage is now falling apart. Plot becomes critical later, when the boy and girl, now in Arizona, decide to take matters into their own hands and go looking for Manuela’s children, but become lost in the desert.

An overwhelming sense of paralysis pervades the first half of the novel, and any reader around the age of the protagonist (mid-thirties) will recognize it: the stage of life at which one has come to terms with the scope of the world’s problems but is no longer starry-eyed enough to believe that they can do anything to fix them. This sentiment emerges as we learn about the protagonist’s unfruitful attempts to help Manuela, a case she perhaps takes on to provide some sense of purpose in an otherwise rudderless life. She and her husband have spent years drifting from project to project without a true sense of direction, and now they find themselves without much to show for their lives. They are adults, they have children, and they know how to perform the rituals of daily life, but in a fleeting moment, the protagonist admits that her husband has become a stranger (21), and she cannot articulate why her marriage is ending (62). The drive to locate Manuela’s children eventually leads the family to an airport in Arizona, where they observe what they believe to be deportation planes from the other side of a chain-link fence (180–86). We understand the protagonist’s drive to find this airport, but we also ask ourselves: what is the point? There will be no storming of the fence, nor a last-minute court injunction. She will merely have a front-row seat for when the catastrophe unfolds.

A strong sense of alienation accompanies this paralysis, strengthened by denying names to the characters throughout much of the novel. Do we as readers really know them at all? The husband in particular is little more than a cypher, our perception of him filtered through the lens of an increasingly passionless wife whose feelings are ambiguous at best. The second half of the novel switches gears, instead centering on the experience of the ten-year-old boy. Although the air of paralysis lingers—he observes how “Ma” gets “strange” after reports about migrant children come on the radio (208), and accepts as inevitable the coming break-up of his parents (348)—there is also hope, an element...