LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE by Valeria Luiselli

I always admire a writer who can evoke a mood so flawlessly.  In this case, the feat is especially amazing, since this is Luiselli’s first novel written in English.  A haunting melancholy pervades this entire novel, and not just because it is about the disintegration of a marriage, the deportation of children, and the defeat of the Apaches.  Yes, the subject matter is devastatingly sad, but the mood is relentless and heightened by the fact that the four main characters—Ma, Pa, the girl, and the boy—are never named.  The story takes place during a cross-country road trip, and everyone, except the 5-year-old girl, knows that the two adults will split up at the end, each taking along the child s/he brought into the marriage.  The 10-year-old boy is the one most resistant to the break-up and at some point begins to chronicle, both in words and photos, the events of the trip for his stepsister who will undoubtedly forget the journey as she grows older.  He also concocts a dangerous plan in an attempt to keep the family together, the results of which are somewhat preposterous and detract a bit from the believability of other aspects of the story.   A twenty-page sentence doesn’t really float my boat, either, but here it conveys a sense of urgency very effectively.  However, looking for a stopping point at bedtime, midsentence, is virtually impossible, so that I had to keep reading anyway, in endless anticipation of that elusive ending punctuation.  Comic relief is just as elusive, although the image of a 5-year-old shouting “Jesus F***ing Christ” did crack me up, almost as much as her asking her parents if a painting of Elvis was Jesus F***ing Christ.  The resemblance is striking, right?  Well, who really knows?