In Grace Paley's short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the narrator: write a simple story. Valeria Luiselli's fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, with the narrator's daughter asking for a novel with a beginning, middle, and end. The book charts the narrator's efforts to corral life into a narrative.
A European Journey
After a slow, entangled divorce, the narrator—a Mexican living in the United States—embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer comes, they fly to Catania in Sicily, where the narrator's grandmother grew up. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who is away on tour, with whom the narrator had a brief and feverish encounter the previous year.
Etna is erupting. Wildfires rage. The narrator's mother, in Baja California, might be developing dementia and is possibly planning an act of eco-terrorism. Before leaving for Europe, her mother gave her a valuable heirloom: a Roman mosaic tile portraying the god Proteus, taken from an excavation site by the narrator's grandmother before leaving Sicily.
Myth and Metafiction
Mother and daughter discuss Proteus's appearance in the Odyssey, their explorations of myth and classical literature becoming a central strand. The daughter grows obsessed with returning the mosaic to the ruined villa it came from. After a few weeks the pianist returns, the narrator's attraction to him rapidly eroding as sex gets rough, he fights with her daughter, and neglects to help when she gets stung by jellyfish.
Yet the novel has trouble gathering momentum—or perhaps isn't interested in doing so. Luiselli breaks her narrative into discrete little segments like the tesserae from which Proteus's face emerges. The narrator questions what she is writing: “I don't have a clear idea about what I am doing, or what will happen next, not yet,” she admits. “I get entangled in possible beginnings, intricate plots, improvised premises.” Later she wonders if this project isn't a novel at all but an essay. This persistent identity crisis is only resolved when the daughter eventually seizes control of the narrative.
Self-Reflexive Style
Luiselli's writing has always been essayistic and self-reflexive. She began in 2010 as an essayist with Sidewalks. Her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, blended autofiction and metafiction; The Story of My Teeth is partly about its own construction. In many ways Beginning Middle End mirrors her previous novel, Lost Children Archive, with shared narration between an unnamed woman and her stepson. In both books the text is divided into short, titled chapters that prefer essayistic thought to dramatic scenes. Both children possess Polaroid cameras, their pictures providing wordless conclusions.
The larger contradiction within Luiselli's work is that although its subjects—the role of the mother, migration, the climate crisis—are universal and urgent, it is becoming ever more inward-looking. The most dramatic journey Beginning Middle End describes is whether it can succeed in becoming the book we hold in our hands. In a knowing moment, the narrator's daughter studies the mosaic of Proteus “as if she were looking into a mirror or a pool of water, like a little Narcissus peering at himself.”
