Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car. The 1960s radical Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir Growing (Up) at 37 that he needed a completely new belief system to bring him back from a crisis so deep that, as he put it, “I felt dead at 34.” For him, as for many, the idea of a clean break with the past felt not only appealing but necessary.
But for those alarmed by the turbulence of midlife, the writer Valeria Luiselli’s novels offer a refreshingly different perspective. “I once read in a book by Saul Bellow that the difference between being alive and dead is just a matter of viewpoint,” the narrator of Luiselli’s debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, recalls. She goes on to explain that the “living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some kind of center.” According to this worldview, the middle of life, far from a time to reset yourself, is the crux of human existence. And in Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning Middle End, it’s also where the messiest, most interesting, and most exciting parts of a story occur.
Creatively speaking, Luiselli is a bit of a chameleon, one who could herself be mistaken for a serial reinventor. The daughter of a Mexican diplomat, she was educated in both English and Spanish. At the start of her career, she wrote in Spanish, but after settling in New York, she switched to English with Tell Me How It Ends, a 2017 book-length essay about her experience as a volunteer court interpreter for undocumented Central American children. She hasn’t published a book of nonfiction since, but she recently told El País that it took her years to determine whether Beginning Middle End would be a novel or an essay. The fineness of the line between the two genres indicates that in her work overall, change is a matter of gradations. The same is certainly true of this book.
Beginning Middle End starts with its nameless, newly single narrator, a Mexican writer living in New York, embarking on a monthslong European trip with her preteen daughter. In theory, this is a fresh beginning post-divorce, but in truth, she’s still in the thick of things: busy worrying about her career, her aging mother, the fact that her daughter will never see her ex-stepbrother again. Luiselli describes her narrator’s age as a time when “what one sees on one side is one’s children walking into life, and then, on the other side, one’s parents on their way out. The middle, then, is a difficult vantage point, where life and death meet.”
Still, the novel is an ode to middles. The narrator thinks longingly of starting anew, but in practice, she’s eager for her existence as a mother and writer to get dull and stable again. Her interest in ordinariness (she dreams of a new “routine, a sustained everydayness”) separates Beginning Middle End from other recent divorce novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours or Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which a female protagonist stages an irrevocable break with their marriage and married self.
[Read: The female-midlife-crisis novel]
Luiselli’s heroine, by contrast, likes continuity. It’s telling that her trip turns out not to include much wandering, though that was her original plan. But after only a few pages of country-hopping, she and her daughter arrive in Sicily, where an acquaintance has offered to lend them an apartment and where the protagonist’s grandmother was originally from. The narrator reports that “as soon as we stepped off the airplane I felt a deep sense of home—past or future, I’m not sure.” Regardless, she decides to remain in Sicily, and what seemed like a road novel reveals itself to be about settling down. Luiselli’s narrator still wants to make a calm life with her daughter, and maybe with a man as well: The acquaintance is an occasional lover of hers, and she awaits his return with rising sexual anticipation. Rather than give up on romance or motherhood, she grabs on to them both.
Yet the narrator still wants some change, even after she gives up on her vision of a summer spent bouncing from place to place. Once in Sicily, she and her daughter discuss reinvention often. They read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and much of the novel is devoted to their quest to return a mosaic of the shape-shifting god Proteus that the narrator’s Sicilian grandmother stole from an archaeological site before immigrating to Mexico. While food shopping, they fixate on a sign on a fishmonger’s stall: Cu nasci tunnu un po’moriri pisci spada, it reads in Sicilian, which the narrator glosses as “if you are born being a tuna fish you can’t die a swordfish.” Both characters seem to bristle at this motto. The daughter’s reaction, in particular, suggests an impressively mature desire to embrace change rather than loathe it—no small feat for a girl who just lost her stepfather and stepbrother to a tough divorce.
[Read: A divorce memoir with no lessons]
As for the narrator, believing that a person can change is even more psychologically important in the aftermath of her marriage, which degraded into a brutality that she recalls as banal in its awfulness. To underscore this reality, Luiselli describes the abuse her character endured in vague, universal language, an attention-grabbing choice given that her prose is otherwise very precise. Her narrator doesn’t even mention her own ex-husband but alludes to “the men who caught us off guard, who escalated so slowly that we didn’t notice at first, because we trusted them, married them, spent a life with them.”
What comes next, though the narrator continues to use us rather than I, is clearly an account of frequent marital rape. After her divorce, she tries to regain her “body before the soul of it was looted,” a search that gives a new weight to her desire to write. She knows that “the only thing that allows me to feel properly grounded in life, present in the present, is being in the middle of writing something that I cannot not write.” Both she and the reader can hope, if not trust, that if she’s present in the present, then her soul will return.
Yet for much of the novel, the narrator is afraid that she is no longer capable of being active in her own life. She has no choice but to do so with her daughter and with her mother, who lives in Mexico and is showing early signs of memory loss. But creatively, she’s less certain. She struggles to concentrate on writing, and at an open-air performance of a Vivaldi opera, she quickly loses focus on the music and instead starts watching her fellow checked-out concertgoers. As she does, she wonders what it is “that allows some minds to catch the thread of a beginning and see it through, and others to lose it (or let it go) and not follow for any longer than a few minutes.” The answer—the ability and willingness to push through distraction to eventually create or appreciate art—is clearly relevant to novel writing, too. If you can’t sit, bored and likely miserable, with the start of a book, you have no way to get to the middle, which Luiselli refers to as the “place where the story simply has to continue.”
Luiselli has long been intrigued by literary boredom. Beginning Middle End, like all of her novels, goes without what its protagonist calls the “corset of plot.” By no means does it lack drama—see: impending lover, maybe-sick mother; because this is Sicily, there’s also a looming volcano—but traditional story does not drive the novel forward. As it winds down, Luiselli does not resolve any of its questions (Is the mom all right? Will the narrator be able to write again?) but instead hands the narrative from the protagonist to her daughter. The novel’s final section takes on the daughter’s voice, and in its last lines, the daughter arbitrarily declares her mother’s book over: “This is the story,” she says. “It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and this is the end.”
By rejecting the myth of beginning again and the idea that endings are inherently meaningful, Luiselli highlights the fascination of the middle. It’s a bold approach to life, more than literature. In the traditional arc of a book, of course, the ending can come only once. A beginning, meanwhile, sets a story’s tone and stakes. It tells the audience whom and what to care about, and creates, ideally, a sense of expectation and intrigue. Beginnings, in short, exist to make you want to read middles. In life, this can be tougher to accept; it’s hard to be in the middle, twisting between life and death.
Still, as my grandfather used to say, it beats the alternative. He was talking about dying, but also, I wouldn’t want to be (or have) a newborn forever, or ditch my husband after the honeymoon, or quit my job as soon as a challenge arises. Forging onward can sound duller and bleaker than launching a new life—hence, I think, the appeal of stories about multiverses—but in fact, it leads directly to the interesting stuff. Beginning Middle End knows that the first and last words in its title are just necessities. It’s the center, where life flails on, that counts.