In her latest novel, Engel, whose fiction has won an array of literary prizes, revisits her own Colombian parents’ roots in an absorbing story of displacement, detention, and deportation that forcefully examines what unites a family beyond the divisions borders and policies forge. Unprecedented as certain aspects of the Trump administration policy was, families such as the one at the heart of Patricia Engel’s new novel, Infinite Country, have been routinely ripped apart by US immigration policies for the better part of a century. If she let her novel descend from the air more often, or if she'd chosen to cover time in chunks rather than swaths, the ideas and characters in Infinite Country might have coexisted more fully, and better amplified each other as a result.

Nuanced, dimensional characters exist to provoke emotional responses, not intellectual ones, which tells me Engel is out for both. But these ideas aren't abstractions, and Engel's characters aren't flat. Its fragmented, summary-focused form clearly prioritizes ideas - how do we define home? Family? Safety? - above all else. To be clear, Infinite Country is not meant to center on character. This is an unusual choice, and an impressive one. Engel sometimes lingers in her characters' inner lives, but only Talia gets a scenic outer one. Infinite Country relies more on detailed narrative summary than on conventional scenes. Engel packs a lot of event and emotion into a slim novel. In swift chapters that bounce between characters and chronologies, Engel moves from Talia's parents' courtship to their emigration to their forced split, and traces their fight afterwards to survive as individuals, and as a family. Infinite Country is less concerned with Talia's quest to reunite with her family, though, than with the choices and circumstances - and cruel immigration policies - that led to their initial separation.

Book review infinite country