Reviewed by Jada Bradley
After receiving much acclaim for her short story collection, Come Together, Fall Apart, Henríquez, whose stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly is back on the scene with a novel. This novel, like its main character, is split between the United States and Panama. As a child, Henríquez, who is half Panamanian, spent a few weeks a year there.
Mira, the protagonist of The World In Half has spent her life in the U.S. with her mother, hearing little about her Panamanian father. Her mother named her after Miraflores, after one of the locks in the Panama Canal and made sure she learned Spanish, but these fleeting links to her father and his homeland are not enough. Mira’s mother suffers from Alzheimer’s and while reading letters as she searches for a medical bill in her ailing mother’s room, Mira learns that it was her mother who left her father behind and not the other way around. A usually studious and cautious college student, Mira makes the uncharacteristically sudden decision to journey to Panama, determined to meet the father she has never known.
Just as Mira’s decision to leave everything and travel to a place she’s never been to meet a father she has never met seems out of the ordinary, so does the author’s decision to begin her novel with the protagonist narrating a passage of scientific facts about the Earth’s core. But as the reader will soon discover the story’s protagonist is a geophysical sciences major. The conceit works, although at times it can get a little precious: just as Mira notes that it would be “impossible for any human to get so close to such a fiery heart [the earth’s core],” so it will be difficult for Mira to get to the heart of the matter in her own situation.
Catherine (Mira’s mother) abandons, Gatun (Mira’s father) while carrying his child, reversing the standard tale of the no-good father who leaves a woman with child. Instead, Catherine separates herself from a heartbroken man and the child he longs to know. Mira is able to piece together what led her mother to that path, and though Mira is not immediately enraged, she does not find it easy to forgive being separated from her father.
As with any journey/travel adventure, one needs a guide. In this case, Mira’s guide is Danilo, who sells flowers and is a bit of a drifter. Danilo is the nephew of Hernán, a doorman who Mira befriends at her hotel. As fate would have it, Danilo knows something about losing parents—he was raised by Hernán after his parents left him behind. Danilo’s parents left with some notion of returning for him, but never did. Unlike Mira, who cannot find her father, Danilo knows how to reach his parents and chooses not to, explaining, “The one who gets left behind deserves to be found.”
What Mira finds is not what she expected. As she processes learning of her mother’s betrayal, while grieving her mother’s illness, she also finds that Hernán and Danilo haven’t exactly been upfront with her either. Without realizing it, people can retrace their parent’s steps, even when the circumstances are different. Danilo reminds Mira that she has the opportunity to forge her own relationship with Panama, and she doesn’t have to repeat history.
In interviews, Henríquez has been candid about the changes that the manuscript went through prior to publication: originally, Mira only appeared in the last third of the story. At first, the book centered on the Panama Canal, which explains why the author wanted to make use of all of the factual information she had about the canal’s construction and operation. In addition to passages that feel a little like non-fiction, the novel also dips its toe into another literary category: the epistolary novel. Mira writes to her friends while she is away. Danilo writes to Mira. When Mira discovers her parents’ letters, she (and by extension the reader) is able to view the breakdown of Gatun and Catherine’s relationship in their words.
Henríquez uses Mira’s geology studies and the process of building the Panama Canal as metaphors for her characters’ lives and relationships, but the other theme here is one of being lost and found. Since she suffers from Alzheimer’s, Catherine will lose the very memories she tried to avoid confronting, but as Mira concludes, “Memory doesn’t have seams to hem it in.” By the end, Mira learns that the father who she thought had left was with her all along and that the mother who raised her has always been and will continue to be beyond her reach in many ways.