The novel proceeds from polyphony: Each chapter is a single long sentence of dialogue without quotation marks, so that at times one has to retread pages looking for attributions. But the central emotional thread — the quiet devastation of familial loss — is simple enough ... This is what American Abductions offers: the art-polemic as a defiant, befitting medium for our dire times.
One of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject ... No simple narrative of injury and restoration, American Abductions threads together a vast psychic web — a shared imaginary, shaped by both grand policy and petty malice, a pain that seeps into our collective unconscious, haunting even our dreams.
While his novels to date dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics, they also set off deeper disturbances ... Cardenas can maunder overmuch; amid the constant changes in perception, we could’ve used the least promise of some greater illumination. But a breakthrough text like this sneers at such promise. Redemption, salvation⎯if they exist at all, it’s in constant play of alternatives.
