Book Review: ‘Short War,’ by Lily Meyer

SHORT WAR, by Lily Meyer

The translator and critic Lily Meyer’s first novel opens in Santiago, Chile, with a lovely, eerie assuredness, a moment like an incantation: a girl walking toward a boy through a crowded party, illuminated. “He knew, with inexplicable, terrifying certainty, that she was coming for him,” the boy, Gabriel Lazris, thinks. He refers to this later as “the true start of his life,” the night he met Caro Ravest, in 1973.

Gabriel is 16, Jewish, American; he came to Santiago with his family as “a monolingual 8-year-old terrified to make eye contact with the school priests or anyone else” and is barely more confident now. His friend Nico gently calls him “our quiet American.” When Caro kisses Gabriel, he has a “soft, cracked-open feeling.” They clink beers in the kitchen, Gabriel reciting the Lazris family toast, an almost charmingly imperialistic relic of the Second World War. “Short war,” he says, and they drink.

But the reader knows what Gabriel doesn’t: that they are all five months away from a coup.

It’s the texture of Gabriel’s story that grabs you, much more than its portrait of American complacency and complicity. Gabriel waiting outside Caro’s school, faint with nerves, “the candied-nut cart streaming sugary smoke” in the plaza. His sullen mother and her tennis diamonds, his conservative journalist father and his bullying dinner-table arguments over black-market fish that has seen better days.

Gabriel knows his father peddles lies about President Salvador Allende to American audiences; when he goes rummaging in his father’s office, he realizes that the C.I.A. will orchestrate a takeover. In June, as Santiago is sealed off and Gabriel prepares to return to the United States, Caro tells him she’s pregnant.