The translator and critic Lily Meyer’s first novel opens in Santiago, Chile, with a lovely, eerie assuredness, a moment like an incantation: a girl walking toward a boy through a crowded party, illuminated. “He knew, with inexplicable, terrifying certainty, that she was coming for him,” the boy, Gabriel Lazris, thinks. He refers to this later as “the true start of his life,” the night he met Caro Ravest, in 1973.
Gabriel is 16, Jewish, American; he came to Santiago with his family as “a monolingual 8-year-old terrified to make eye contact with the school priests or anyone else” and is barely more confident now. His friend Nico gently calls him “our quiet American.” When Caro kisses Gabriel, he has a “soft, cracked-open feeling.” They clink beers in the kitchen, Gabriel reciting the Lazris family toast, an almost charmingly imperialistic relic of the Second World War. “Short war,” he says, and they drink.
But the reader knows what Gabriel doesn’t: that they are all five months away from a coup.
It’s the texture of Gabriel’s story that grabs you, much more than its portrait of American complacency and complicity. Gabriel waiting outside Caro’s school, faint with nerves, “the candied-nut cart streaming sugary smoke” in the plaza. His sullen mother and her tennis diamonds, his conservative journalist father and his bullying dinner-table arguments over black-market fish that has seen better days.
Gabriel knows his father peddles lies about President Salvador Allende to American audiences; when he goes rummaging in his father’s office, he realizes that the C.I.A. will orchestrate a takeover. In June, as Santiago is sealed off and Gabriel prepares to return to the United States, Caro tells him she’s pregnant.
“Short War” is a novel built from novellas, and we move next to Gabriel’s daughter, Nina, in 2015, when she’s a grad student researching a protest movement in Buenos Aires. She thinks of herself as a scholar of connection, someone who believes in learning “to pay real, sustained attention to others.” At the same time she’s started to worry that her career is only an excuse to waste time on social media. Gabriel looms at the edges of her story — depressed and lonely in Chicago, calling Nico on weekends, too broken by loss to return to Santiago even now. “Short war,” he says to Nina before she leaves for Argentina, clinking her glass.
Meyer’s interest is the absurdity of that phrase, a toast, we learn in her acknowledgments, borrowed from her own family. The book that changes Nina’s life — with its intertwined stories of kidnapping, torture and survival — is called “Guerra Eterna,” its title a refutation: eternal war. She reads about a Chilean survivor sheltering in Mexico City with her Jewish toddler and her nightmares, and feels a stab of foreboding when she learns the child’s father was American. She calls Gabriel and asks him, over the hiss of the line: Are you in a book? “I was afraid this would happen,” he says. And Nina begins to piece together her family’s haunted past.
It’s hard for the light liberal satire of Nina’s story to compete with the immediacy of Gabriel’s, or the life and color around him — Caro, unapologetically lovely and smart-mouthed; the vulgar funniness and kindness of Gabriel’s friends. When Nina comes in, a sensual urgency leaves the narrative and never really comes back. And that may be the point. The question at the core of Nina’s story is whether she can ever have a life separate from her father’s, something that isn’t small in comparison. She calls herself “a story leech,” wearing “her dad’s grief like hand-me-down clothes.”
As Caro walks toward a teenage Gabriel at the party in 1973, he knows the rest of his life is about to begin. Nothing for Nina will ever be so clear.
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