The Brooklyn Rail

“All American abduction stories are alike,” declares Aura, formerly a professor of Latin American literature and now one of the dozens of people abducted⎯ snatched, caged, shipped away⎯ over the course of this novel (for lack of a better word), in which every brief chapter features a miniature tragedy of separation, violent and heartbreaking, and yet each also offers some kind of talking cure, some gab-fest, though rarely face to face, rather via phone or chatbot, and in this way every brief chapter spins the core atrocity in a kaleidoscope, and the widening circle of shattered survivors all prove Aura wrong, their pieces fall into fresh combination of shapes and colors, a different look, and no one ever lacks for a wisecrack, either, boy can they talk (or type), until every brief chapter becomes a conversational fractal that unfolds like this sentence: one long, strange run-on.

That’s imitation, my opening, and I intend it as the sincerest form of flattery. Mauro Javier Cárdenas can maunder with the best. The syntax in his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), shuttled between telegraphic and garrulous, but his next, Aphasia (2021), sank into pillowy heaps of rhetoric like those in the new American Abductions. What’s more, he pulls off these high-style hijinks in his second language; born and raised in Ecuador, Cárdenas went on to attend Stanford and now lives in San Francisco. Yet, while his novels to date dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics, they also set off deeper disturbances.

Granted, this author loves his fireworks. In a 2021 interview with Dustin Illingworth, Cárdenas gets pugnacious about “mocking traditional realism,” and goes on to assert, “the only truly experimental literature of the 21st century is that which plays with algorithms.” And don’t algorithms constitute another sort of kaleidoscope, playing endless changes on the same elements? Nevertheless, Cárdenas also terms his novels to date an “American trilogy,” all about the inhumanity of the Anglo North towards the Latin South.

In the trio’s closer, any two or three pages⎯always a single sentence, and often a single chapter⎯will hopscotch among speakers and subjects while disdaining any punctuation except the comma and, occasionally, the parentheses. Clever wordplay abounds, mostly so embedded in the back-and-forth it’s difficult to cite (exception: “I am versatile at using versatile wrong”). Then too, the text name-checks all sorts of off-the-rails artwork. Speaking of Hopscotch, Cortázar comes up plenty, as does Leonora Carrington, Roberto Bolaño, others⎯not every reference South American or even literary (here John Cage, there Arvo Part). Yet amid all this gamesmanship, those same two or three pages will drop in grim materials, the impact of which doesn’t depend on book learning:

…that moment when the American abductors captured her father as he was driving her and her sister to school, which she recorded on her phone…

…the Racist in Chief has ordered his enforcers to abduct Latin American children from their Latin American parents as a lesson, a deterrent, don’t come here again…

American Abductions takes its title from an ugly crime, sanctioned by an ugly, criminal state. The central kidnapping⎯the inciting incident, in a conventional drama⎯is the father, Antonio, roughhoused out of his car in front of his terror-stricken daughters Eva and Ads. He’s a good citizen, a San Francisco architect driving his kids to school, but the “Pale Americans” are growing ever more Fascist. The father is seized and shipped back to Bogotá, and as for due process, “they kicked my father until his sprawled body … halted its movements.” After that the narrative unfolds via a swift-moving blur of diverse perspectives, starting with Ada’s video⎯which goes viral but changes nothing⎯a widening ripple of shock and sorrow, since everyone responding is either part of the shattered family or another Latin pariah, and everyone’s also part of the text’s circus act, juggling high culture and low punning. All these devices would be anathema to George Orwell, yet the world of this new novel is decidedly Orwellian.

Indeed, these Abductions share some elements with the first two novels (roughly, the story of Antonio’s decision to quit Ecuador and the costs of his emigration), and so this latest permutation seems to ring as ominous a warning as 1984. The Northern homeland has banned all books out of the South. It’s created a kidnappers’ bureaucracy so tangled that cases can never get sorted out. Anyone with even the least connection to the initial smash-and-grab suffers the same anxiety, “part of a collective mind,” no matter how much distance they’ve put between themselves and the Pale Americans: “his hands feel … both the wind outside the window in Panama and the handcuffs on his lap in Texas.”

This pervading chill, call it a homelessness of the spirit, distinguishes a burgeoning cluster of contemporary fictions. Such novels and stories, naturally, are often by writers with a personal (or familial) experience of immigration, like Bernardine Evaristo or Jokha Alharthi, but what unites them most is how they dramatize the trauma of the unhoused while also rejecting its straightforward presentation. The story construct itself never feels cozy. This applies especially to American Abductions, whose author can’t abide the term “trauma.” He finds it so degraded that in both the Illingworth interview and this novel, he suggests replacing it with a whacky neologism: “demipenteract,” defined as “a five-dimensional hypercube.”

What’s improbable, that is, transmutes into the truly weird, like the screwball output of an algorithm. Yet to comprehend the text’s process this way also indicates its problems. All the novel’s onlookers and commentators have “plenty of terrifying moments to choose from,” and so as every few pages presents another refraction, a different dimension of the hypercube, Cárdenas can maunder overmuch; amid the constant changes in perception, we could’ve used the least promise of some greater illumination.

But a breakthrough text like this sneers at such promise. Redemption, salvation⎯if they exist at all, it’s in constant play of alternatives. When a psychotherapist, interpreting dreams, asks, “please refrain from any cubist jokes,” he’s plainly in the wrong novel. Because if Picasso can do it, why can’t Cárdenas? Isn’t his collective mind full of distorted faces? In another sequence, Ada recalls (over the telephone, with a woman far removed from her tragedy) how her father “hated those American novels that begin with the usual trauma/banal combo,” like, “on the day I was abducted the weather was super nice.” American Abductions hits that combo with a demipenter-bomb, and the flying shards hurt more than we could ever have expected:

…saying, as I had asked her to say if I didn’t pick her up from school or if men wearing fake police vests tried to detain her, my name is Aura Restropo, I am an American citizen, my mother is Auxilio Restropo…