Actually Pretty Good: American Abductions
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas's dispatch from the future of the deportation machine
Do you miss literary feuds? Nowadays most novelist just scratch each other’s backs and trade blurbs, working as free promoters for their cohorts with the expectation it’ll be returned when their own book comes out. But back in the days of letter writing and glossy magazine interviews, when writers could be honest without risking their livelihoods (or writers were financially stable enough to risk their careers), novelists aired all their petty grievances with reckless abandon. Hemingway and Faulkner had their own kind of masculine pissing match, Hemingway and Fitzgerald drank themselves into quite a number of tiffs, Capote and Vidal traded many a stinging bon mot, Vidal and Norman Mailer scuffled on the Dick Cavett Show, Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman also got into it via Dick Cavett (what a pot-stirrer!). Details on these feuds and more can be found in this excellent LitHub article, but suffice to say they don’t really happen anymore (the latest example in said article is from 2011, and ended in apologies rather than a fist-fight); the closest we’ll get are pan-happy critics writing books, and then having the retributive knives come out for those books. It’s all in group chats now, or blind-item tweets, only occasionally surfacing into real public animus (Brandon Taylor vs. Rachel Kushner’s husband after Bookforum pan, we hardly knew ye.)
So call it a breath of fresh air to see an author like Mauro Javier Cárdenas, an Ecuadorian writer, who happily takes to social media (@ineluctablequak on Twitter/X and Bluesky) to air out all his issues with staid American letters and boring literary fiction in general, and also tirelessly promote his literary heroes – Bernhard, Bolaño, and Krasznahorkai, among many others in the long-sentence set. These posts haven’t risen to the level of pure feuds, as Cárdenas is a relatively lesser-known artist to begin with and public responses to these jeremiads have been thus far been at least publicly nonexistent, but it’s at least refreshing to see someone tell it like it is, consequences be damned.
As they say, if you talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk, and Cárdenas’s fiction is anything but boring; his latest novel, American Abductions, is a thrillingly experimental work, ingeniously structured, intellectually rigorous, an ideal marriage of content and form that has all but been abandoned within contemporary fiction. It makes all the posts and jokes feel more like someone more disappointed than angry; why write any other way when you could simply write like this?
American Abductions imagines a not-so-distant (and in fact rapidly approaching) America where all Latin American immigrants are deported from the country, whether they arrived ‘legally’ or not. It takes the ‘deportation machine’ set up by the Obama/Trump/Biden presidencies and makes it frighteningly literal, with our vast surveillance apparatus used to quickly identify and capture immigrants. (One character imagines that someday “someone will offer tours of the data centers of the surveillance agencies of the United States.”) Being the American government, these are especially brutal operations, with parents and children separated in public, as in the case of Ada and Eva, who see their father, Antonio, taken in by the authorities as he drives to drop them off at school. It being our mediated 21st century, Ada captures the deportation on video, and it becomes something of a viral sensation, their trauma among the innumerable atrocities that make up one’s algorithmic feed. At another point in the novel, a video of deported mother being reunited with her child is turned into reassuring pablum for the masses, a result of the flattening affect of online videos, which turns everything into You Have To See This grist. As Ada thinks of her own video:
– and yes, you can still find her video and the variations of her video online – want to watch Ada sob like the sea? click here now! – and what she remembers more than her video of the abductors capturing her father while he was driving her and her sister to school is the asinine interviews she had t ogive to try to save him – yes I miss my father – yes I want him back – sob to the nth power is that enough? – the reassuring slogans that were expected of her – we are stronger than the Racist in Chief – I have to be strong for my dad – and so on, as if someone had pressed the deportation button on the American narrative machine and a whole act of characters had come alive…
Ada and Eva remain in the US after Antonio’s deportation; Eva eventually joins him in Colombia, while Ada stays behind in San Francisco. When Antonio falls ill, Eva asks Ada to come to Colombia, but her ability to visit is limited by the American inimical spirit. Ada, separated physically from her family, and Eva, as Antonio’s health worsens, pick up their father’s project of interviewing and collecting narratives from other victims of the deportation program, children separated from their parents, parents separated from their children, families fractured across borders. What emerges from these interviews, by father or daughters, is a multi-vocal, panoptic and swirling evocation of the pure tragedy of America’s long program of expulsion. It’s not a dirge, though, or a ponderous piece of Issues Fiction (get ready for a lot of that over the next four years); it is also a book filled with humor and hard-earned joy, suffused with a rare philosophical intelligence that saves it from any hint of mawkishness. It’s in fact a novel in opposition to any kind of mushy sentimentality and trauma narrativity:
…my father was always pointing out narrative clichés for my sister and I during dinner he hated those American novels that begin with the usual trauma / banal combo, for instance, Ada says, give me an example, Aura says, on the day my father way dying I received a brand new edition of How to Make Friends and Influence People, Ada says, on the day I was abducted the weather was super nice, Aura says, on the day my father was captured by the American abductors I received a love letter from Carlitos, Ada says, poor Carlitos forever sending love letters at the wrong time, Aura says, reader I married Carlitos, Ada says, on the day I read an expose about how my foster home was shut down because of its tenebrous links to the American abductions of Latin American children at the border the birds were sining, Aura says, reader I lied I didn’t marry Carlitos Carlitos wad deported a long time ago, Ada says….
Like his literary heroes Sebald, Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, and (sometimes) Bolaño, Cárdenas writes in looping, chapter-long sentences, emphasizing repetition, rhythm and accretion. The chapters of American Abductions are mostly built around dialogues, though in our increasingly busy society where autoplaying videos, questionably helpful AI-helpers, and the FBI agent reading this (hi!) all have the ability to pipe up at any moment, these dialogues gather in more and more voices than a simple pas a deux, voices jumping in both interruptive or sonorously harmonious, like a radio constantly scanning and picking up new frequencies:
…perhaps we need these outward symbolic activities so our imagination can continue to output new scenarios in which our loved ones are still with us, Ada says, like you and I and these interviews Tata couldn’t complete, Eva says, I’ve started imagining that Tata brought me a hamster called Hamster when I was little isn’t that silly, Ada says, is that the Adagio for Strings in the background are you okay, Eva says, sleep let’s talk tomorrow, Ada says, at last Roberto Carlos is back from the hospital, Ada, Ada’s father says, all rodents will be expunged from the record, Eva, Sir John says, Mehr Licht, Goethe says, could we spend recess together I could tell you my dreams from last night, Carlitos says, the joke being that Mehr Licht doesn’t equate to more light but more Lichtenberg, Glenn Gould says, I have come from the future to tell you if my Anywhere Door doesn’t work you can borrow my Sequence Spray, Aura, Doraemon says, my American parents arrive to the foster home early in the morning because they paid extra to have first picks…
The effect is at first bewildering – you can lose track of who exactly is speaking quite easily – but as the book progresses, one becomes comfortably submerged beneath the flow, ready for the next time the Leonora Carrington quote machine that one character has programmed is called into action, or the next time an art installation is brainstormed on the spot out of the material(s) of the dialogue. Among the book’s many referents is Julio Cortazar, and Cárdenas is as interested as Cortazar (and Nabokov, and Perec, and any other number of tricksters) in literary games and puzzles, filling the novel with puns, logical inversions and wordplay. There’s the aforementioned Carrington generator (the only appealing part of the future Cárdenas imagines - if only our large language models could be so useful), but also characters named Roberto Bolaño (no relation) and Auxilio Lacouture (Amulet, great minor Bolaño novel), a robot assistant trained on the works of Bolaño, rats named Roberto Carlos (fantastic player), dream analyzers on the airwaves, and ever more baroque methods of monitoring speech, and equal countermoves used to avoid and/or use said monitors. The game of the novel might be simply put as erecting walls of tech-addled mediation and then fighting for real novelistic feeling to come through the thicket, which makes the revelations of the characters pack even more of a wallop; the desensitized algorithmic field is eventually punctured by the wrenchingly real.
Postmodern experimentation (this is a Dalkey Archive Press book, after all) is often thought to be mutually exclusive with novelistic feeling (most famously by Jonathan Franzen, but also by scores of critics and readers alike - just look up your favorite even half-smart books on Goodreads to see a bunch of wailing morons complaining that they couldn’t connect with it). You can think as much as you feel, though, and the masters have always been able to mix difficulty with humanity – think Ashbery, Pynchon, Gaddis, along with the rest of Cárdenas’s personal canon. (I named too many Americans there.) If Cárdenas can’t find anyone to start a good old fashioned writerly dust-up with, it’s likely because there aren’t too many other writers working on his level, no equal challengers willing to step up. It’s lonely at the top, but you might as well enjoy the view from up there.
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