New Yorker Fiction Review #202: "Everything is Far from Here" by Cristina Henriquez



Review of a short story from the July 24, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

"Everything is Far from Here" is not light reading. The story tackles one of the great geopolitical issues of our time: illegal/undocumented immigration. It's pretty difficult to comment on this story without getting into deep essay on immigration policy, which I'm not prepared to do right now.

In general, I am not in favor of tackling huge political issues in fiction, although it's been done for centuries and will continue to be done as long as we have books. I feel as though, if you have a political statement to make, you should write an essay. Granted, I'm sure just about anyone could argue against this and tell me that some number (any number) of my favorite novels have deep political statements. Fine.

As a "story" in and of itself, "Everything is Far from Here" was extremely compelling. The close third-person perspective and the "carousel" type of feeling made for good page-turning material. Henriquez uses pretty lean prose as well, which I'm always a fan of.

All the same, it's not like Henriquez has pulled off anything overly intriguing here, from a writing standpoint. Her goal was to show the frightening, terrorizing experience of an illegal immigrant caught between mortal danger in her homeland and an unwelcome reception in her new land, while having lost her son in the process. Henriquez accomplished this pretty well. But for me to stay interested -- for most readers to stay interested -- I'd have had to start seeing a broader layer of character development, or some glimmer of "hope" for the main character. Reading about an inexorable slide into oblivion is not entertaining fiction. True to life though it may be.





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