Lost Children Archive
A family drives from New York to the Arizona border while the child migrant crisis unfolds. Luiselli's formally inventive novel about borders, family, and documentation is a vital political novel of the period, written with experimental rigor and moral urgency.
The novel puts a mother's marital strain in the same frame as migrant children's suffering at the border, and critics of that choice call it “comparing apples to oranges” rather than illumination. Several readers go further, calling the empathy the book extends to migrant families “a terribly middle-class, privileged, and clumsy brand of empathy” that borrows suffering it never actually depicts, since the migrant children themselves stay offstage. The dense apparatus, epigraphs, box inventories, interpolated Elegies, reads to these readers as “showy literary affectations” rather than earned structure. Even the unbroken multi-page sentence that wins other readers over strikes some as the book “jumping up to perform tricks,” exhausting rather than earning its formal risk.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
