In this work with autobiographical overtones, Luiselli mainly tells three stories: that of a woman novelist working on a work memorializing her youth in the midst of a mildly trivial domestic life; that of a woman living in New York City years ago who was obsessed with publishing a collection of poems by the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen and was not above resorting to deception in order to do so; and that of the poet Owen, whose marriage had failed, and who years ago was living away in Philadelphia, where he was gradually losing his eyesight in the throes of cataracts.

In this richly experimental work, Luiselli naturally and decisively cuts up the continuum of time and space in which the story develops, and the repeated shifts in narrative perspective create a natural sense of fantasy. The passages about family life are the closest thing to a shallow awakening in this dream, as a boy (“he’s neither the big boy nor the little boy ” (p2)) and his unexpectedly arrived sister occupy his mother’s daytime and workstations. “I” writes: “Novels need a sustained breath. That’s what novelists want. “ and “I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is—has to be—in short bursts. I’m short of breath” (p4). Indeed, Faces in the Crowd is a work of short breaths, with a preference for thin, short sentences shaping the novel’s distinctive flavor, a dizzying array of rapidly shifting perspectives and angles, and stretches of coherent fiction are invariably interrupted repeatedly by the boy’s thousand and one questions. However, unlike many more “realistic” authors, Luiselli doesn’t complain about or dramatize the pressures of family life on creativity although a few light silhouettes can reveal this thing. Instead, her restrained and precise writing suggests to the reader the subtle interplay between everyday life and writing. For example, “I” declares that her work is “A silent novel, so as not to wake the children.”(p3) This statement, on the one hand, separates the moment of writing from the laborious, fragile, and innocent life, creating a bitter sense of distance, and on the other hand, it is also a self-conscious recognition of the youthful years under the pen, which sets the emotional tone before more of the story unfolds.

Faces in the Crowd provides us with a clever metaphor for the work itself. Author Valeria Luiselli writes of it, “a dense, porous novel. Like a baby’s heart.” (p28)

My question is: other than this novel, what other novel is made up of fragments?