In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation with My Father makes a request to the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story once again,” her father says, “the way Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov wrote… just recognizable people and then write what happened to them next.” His effort, and his failure to impress her, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is inspired by a similar request, with Luiselli as the narrator’s daughter asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, middle, and end?” It’s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end”.
The beginning middle end shows the storyteller’s efforts to mold life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story will not be similarly affected. After a “slow, complicated” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. Her coil has been removed in Munich; Her daughter lost a tooth in Prague; Near Amsterdam they see children learning to swim wearing shoes in flood conditions. When summer comes, the couple flies to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They live in the apartment of a pianist who is on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and enthusiastic encounter” the previous year.
This book could be condensed with a plot: Etna is erupting. Forest fire is raging. The narrator’s mother in Baja California probably has dementia and is possibly planning eco-terrorism. Before the narrator left for Europe his mother gave him a valuable inheritance, a Roman mosaic tile depicting the god Proteus; The narrator’s grandmother took it from an excavation site before leaving Sicily.
Mother and daughter discuss the appearance of Proteus in the Odyssey, his exploration of myth and classical literature which becomes a central thread. The narrator’s daughter becomes obsessed with returning the mosaic to the ruined villa from which it came.
The pianist returns after a few weeks, the narrator’s attraction to her rapidly diminishes as the sex becomes wilder, he fights with his daughter, and neglects to help her when she is stung by a jellyfish. Yet despite all this, the novel is having trouble gaining momentum – or perhaps it has no interest in doing so. Paley’s narrator calls the plot “the perfect line between two points I have always despised”. Luiselli seems to be feeling the same way, breaking her narrative into separate small sections like the tesserae from which the face of Proteus emerges.
Throughout, the narrator questions what she is writing. “I don’t have a clear idea yet of what I’m doing, or what’s next,” she admits. “I get caught up in possible beginnings, complicated plots, improvised premises.” Later he wonders if the project is not a novel at all but an essay. “Perhaps the middle doesn’t fit the tight architecture of the novel, the structure of the plot. The middle feels more akin to the distracted, loose, wandering spirit of the essay. Perhaps it has to remain an essay until it becomes a novel again, an essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” This continuing identity crisis is only resolved when the daughter finally regains control of the narrative.
Luiselli’s writing has always been essayistic and self-reflective. In fact, he started out as an essayist in 2010 with the lyrical, literary Sidewalks. His first novel, Faces in the Crowd, blends autofiction and metafiction – the book portrays his own creation, as does Beginning Middle End – with a fictional account of the life of a real Mexican poet. His second book, The Story of My Teeth, is also partly about its creation: in an author’s note Luiselli explains how the book was created together with a group of factory workers. In a Sebaldian touch, photographs accompany the text.
In many ways The Beginning mirrors the middle and Luiselli’s previous novel, 2019’s Lost Children’s Archive, itself a fictional extension of Tell Me How It Ends. Its narrative is shared between an unnamed woman, whose marriage is falling apart, and her stepson, who passes on his share to his stepsister. In the early-middle ending the unnamed narrator’s marriage has ended, and his daughter writes a postcard to her stepbrother. In both books the text is divided into short, titled chapters that prioritize essayistic thought rather than the creation of dramatic scenes. Both children have Polaroid cameras, their photographs providing wordless conclusions to each novel. There is another obvious link that paradoxically divides the books’ narrators, but revealing it would be a spoiler.
The great paradox within Luiselli’s work is that although the themes it returns to – the role and position of the mother, migration, the climate crisis – are universal and urgent, it is becoming more introverted. The most dramatic journey of the early to middle ending is whether it can succeed in becoming the book we hold in our hands. In a knowing moment, the narrator’s daughter studies a mosaic of Proteus – a shapeshifter, just like in this novel – “as if she were looking into a mirror or a pond of water, like a little Narcissus looking at himself”. Since finishing the book, this is the image that sticks most strongly in my memory.
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