Jennifer Welsh's Reviews > Lost Children Archive

This is a novel of a woman saying goodbye to her family. It is an archive of this goodbye, organized into small bites – the woman is a professional archivist, and it’s in her nature. Within this tight structure, as emotions ebb and flow, pain bubbles to the surface.

The family created was a foursome: a mother and a father, a boy and a girl. The girl was hers, the boy his, when work drew the couple together: both the mother and the father told an overlooked part of each story by focusing on the sounds of a life. I found this fascinating, and started listening harder to my days, started remembering the sounds of events.

The story is of a road trip across the US, after which the family will return to a life in pairs – one parent with one child. The road trip has a purpose and an end. The man wants to end up in Arizona to pursue a sound documentary on the lost tribes of The Apache. Throughout the road trip, we get to “hear” his stories of this community when he entertains the children. We witness how the children respond, the children who don’t yet know what’s coming. The very thing that drew their parents together is now pulling them apart.

The creative pull on these characters is more powerful than the need to preserve a family. Luiselli taps into the truth of that choice. The story, told from the POV of the woman, is not about whether she should stay or go: it’s about how painful it is to be pulled apart by a force greater than her will from the ones she loves. Add to that her work – to help children at the US-Mexican border reunite with their parents – and what’s highlighted are questions of privilege and choice, the damage done to children through separation, and the human ability to adapt no matter how much it hurts.

The last part of the book is told from the perspective of the young boy. He and his sister run away, get lost, and take a kind of road trip of their own, apart from their drifting parents. Here the book takes on a slightly different tone, perhaps a bit warmer to the mom’s archival cool.

Overall, the story asks, when two good parents make something good together, does that need to continue in its living form to matter, or can it, too, be archived and then held sacred?

4.5