American Abductions
The novel proceeds from polyphony: Each chapter is a single long sentence of dialogue without quotation marks, so that at times one has to retread pages looking for attributions. But the central emotional thread — the quiet devastation of familial loss — is simple enough ... This is what American Abductions offers: the art-polemic as a defiant, befitting medium for our dire times.
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One of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject ... No simple narrative of injury and restoration, American Abductions threads together a vast psychic web — a shared imaginary, shaped by both grand policy and petty malice, a pain that seeps into our collective unconscious, haunting even our dreams.
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While his novels to date dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics, they also set off deeper disturbances ... Cardenas 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.
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