Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli review – a mother and daughter’s odyssey

In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov … Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next.” Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, the daughter of the Luiselli-like narrator asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an 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”.

Beginning Middle End charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story would be similarly unimpressed. 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, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who’s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year.

This book can be made to sound dense with plot: 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 the narrator left for Europe her mother gave her a valuable heirloom, a Roman mosaic tile portraying the god Proteus; the narrator’s grandmother took it from an excavation site before leaving Sicily.

Mother and daughter discuss Proteus’s appearance in the Odyssey, their explorations of myth and classical literature becoming a central strand. The narrator’s 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 the sex gets rough, he fights with her daughter, and neglects to help when she gets stung by jellyfish. Yet despite all this, the novel has trouble gathering momentum – or perhaps isn’t interested in doing so. Paley’s narrator calls plot “the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised”. Luiselli’s seems to feel the same way, breaking her narrative into discrete little segments like the tesserae from which Proteus’s face emerges.

Throughout, 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. “Perhaps the middle does not fit into the tighter architecture of a novel, the corset of plot. The middle feels more akin to the distracted, loose, meandering spirit of essaying. Maybe it will have to be an essay until it can be a novel again, an essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” This persistent identity crisis is only resolved when the daughter eventually seizes control of the narrative.

Luiselli’s writing has always been essayistic and self-reflexive. In fact, she began in 2010 as an essayist with the lyrical, literary Sidewalks. Her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, blended autofiction and metafiction – the book portraying its own construction, just as Beginning Middle End does – with a fictionalised account of the life of a real Mexican poet. Her second, The Story of My Teeth, is also partly about its own construction: in an author’s note Luiselli explains how the book was created in tandem with a group of factory workers. In a Sebaldian touch, photographs accompany the text.

In many ways Beginning Middle End mirrors Luiselli’s previous novel, 2019’s Lost Children Archive, itself a fictional expansion of Tell Me How It Ends. Its narration is shared between an unnamed woman, whose marriage is collapsing, and her stepson, who addresses his part to his stepsister. In Beginning Middle End the unnamed narrator’s marriage has ended, and her daughter writes postcards to her stepbrother. In both books the text is divided into short, titled chapters that prefer essayistic thought to the construction of dramatic scenes. Both children come into possession of Polaroid cameras, their pictures providing wordless conclusions to each novel. There is another explicit link, one that paradoxically divides the books’ narrators, but revealing it would be a spoiler.

The larger contradiction within Luiselli’s work is that although the subjects it returns to – the role and status 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 – a shapeshifter, just like this novel – “as if she were looking into a mirror or a pool of water, like a little Narcissus peering at himself”. Since finishing the book, it’s the image that has persisted most strongly in my memory.