A Road Trip That Feels Familiar

Have you taken an awkward car ride recently? I’d bet most people have been stuck in a car with someone they would rather leave on the curb. The confines of the space and the unavoidable reality that both people need the car in order to get to a place where they don’t have to be together any more makes the experience pretty intense.

I was reminded of that feeling as I read Valeria Luiselli’s first novel written in English, “Lost Children Archive.” At the center of this subtly beautiful story is a family road trip in a used Volvo from New York to Arizona’s border with Mexico. It’s summer, sometime during the present-day immigration crisis. The mother and father have just finished a four-year project recording the sounds of New York City. Paired up as a team during the project, they fell in love and got married, bringing together his son, now 10, and her daughter, 5. 

We meet this family through the voice of the mother, a meandering, thoughtful person who slowly realizes that her marriage is coming apart. The husband has decided his next audio project will be one he really cares about, a recording of the remnants of the lost Apaches. She wants to be supportive, but she knows on a deeper level that her marriage will probably end when the road trip is over. 

Meantime, she has reconnected with a mother from her daughter’s school who has two older daughters caught at the Mexican border awaiting release. When the two girls go missing from the system entirely, our narrator’s creative purpose on the trip is defined: to document the stories of immigrant children, young and alone, who are pouring across the border. 

If you’ve ever read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novels or the late W.G. Sebald’s memory-infused books scattered with photos and mementos like a scrap book, “Lost Children Archive” will appeal to you. The woman’s voice is at once melancholy and inspired as she describes the hours each day in the car, her husband at the wheel. Scattered within the free-flowing narration are lists of books they have brought, sections sometimes read aloud, Polaroids the son has taken along the journey, scraps of poems. It is absorbing and rich, especially for anyone who has experienced the slow, not unloving dissolution of what was once a vital relationship. 

However, despite the adult undercurrents, the smart, very real children relegated to the back seat are what make this novel come alive. Luiselli captures the roving imagination and curiosity of these children with amazing skill as they try not only to make sense of what is happening to their family, but in the increasingly scary world around them. A place in which children go lost. 

Just as the pressure in the car peaks, the boy or the girl blurts out the classic road trip question, which our narrator finds more and more difficult to answer reassuringly: Are we there yet?