Kelly Blewett

Francisco Cantú’s quietly heartbreaking memoir The Line Becomes a River explores the reckless contours of the U.S.-Mexico border, a place Cantú first knew through memory (as the grandson of a migrant), then through higher learning (as he studied international relations in college), then through his profession (as a border patrol agent) and finally, through poetic recounting (as a witness to and chronicler of the border). The Line Becomes a River, comprised of journalistic dispatches and lyrical descriptions of troubling dreams and landscapes, is both intimate and unforgettable.

The memoir opens as Cantú enlists in the border patrol. His mother, part confidant and part prophet, warns him of the dangers of associating with the institution. She doesn’t understand Cantú’s attraction to the role; she is uneasy and fearful. Cantú, both brash and compassionate, argues in favor of the career: As a Spanish speaker, he can be of real service to the migrants; as someone curious about the border, he can finally peer into the everyday confrontations that unfold there.

But the everyday confrontations are horrible and mundane: a dead man’s body left to decompose overnight, dope hauls and the attendant paperwork, starry skyscapes that hang uneasily over enemies hiding from each other in dark mountains. Cantú is forever changed by this work, and while he becomes good at it, he finds he cannot see it through. Even after he leaves, he is haunted. He writes, “I often recognized the subtle mark left by the crossing of the border, an understanding of its physical and abstract dimensions, a lingering impression of its weight.” This memoir—already much acclaimed and the winner of the prestigious Whiting Award—helps readers see the border as Cantú does, a place full of ambiguity and danger, a place hidden in plain sight, a place Americans should try to see.

Like The Other Wes Moore and Between the World and Me, Danielle Allen’s Cuz presents a rich personal narrative in trenchant historical and political context. Allen tells the story of Michael, her irrepressible cousin with the dazzling smile.

Although Danielle was raised in relative comfort—she describes the casual security of being a professor’s kid in the college environments where she grew up and now makes a living (Allen is a political philosopher at Harvard University) —Michael’s family, the family of Allen’s father’s youngest sister, lived on the edge. When they moved to LA during Michael’s adolescence, Michael committed petty theft. And then, at age 15, he attempted carjacking at gunpoint. He didn’t shoot (in fact, he got shot in the neck), but the judge opted to try him as an adult. Suddenly, this adolescent faced 13 years in prison, a sentence nearly as long as his life had been so far.

The devastating effect of prison on Michael is beautifully wrought in poetic, heartfelt and restrained prose by his cousin, who frequently visited him. When he was released, it was Allen who helped get him established. Despite her best efforts (which far outstripped anything I could imagine undertaking), within a few years he was found shot to death in a car.

Allen’s searing memoir seeks to understand what happened to Michael within the context of LA during the 1990s just after the “three strikes” rule came to pass, as fears of carjacking were running rampant and as gang affiliations pulsed in the street. Having read several books like Cuz in an attempt to understand what is happening in this country, I can say that Allen’s is one of the strongest. This book—part elegy, part history, part political philosophy—is wholly unforgettable.

Naoki Higashida is a nonverbal, autistic young man whose first widely translated memoir, The Reason I Jump, written when he was 13, was received with acclaim and incredulity. Acclaim because it detailed the vivid inner life of someone who had, before his mother’s intervention with what they call an “alphabet grid” (a modified QWERTY keyboard), seemed unresponsive, and incredulity because it seemed impossible that someone who was genuinely autistic and working independently could compose such coherent and artful prose. Since writing The Reason I Jump, Higashida has become a celebrity in Japan and the second most widely translated Japanese author behind Haruki Murakami.

Higashida’s new collection—comprised of blog entries, poems, a short story and an interview—brings readers up to speed with the author, now in his early 20s. His thoughts on neurological diversity are riveting: “My brain has this habit of getting lost inside things. Finding the way in is easy, but—like being in a maze—finding your way out is a lot harder. I want to exit the maze right now, but I’m forced to stay inside it. This applies also to time and schedules. They constrain me.” Higashida’s accounts of thinking in images, feeling compelled to make repetitive movements and the difficulties and pleasures of communicating make this book totally captivating. Translator and bestselling author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) introduces the volume with an account of the dismay he felt when Higashida’s work was dismissed by critics as fraudulent. Mitchell points out that he has witnessed Higashida’s composing firsthand, and that, moreover, Higashida’s prose has changed the way he perceives—and interacts with—his own autistic son. Mitchell writes that bringing Higashida’s writing to a larger public has been the most important writing task of his life.

Readers will find this older Higashida not only eloquent and thoughtful, but also wise, measured and, most of all, kind.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.