There's room for everyone in 'Now I Surrender,' an epic American Western

"In the beginning, things appear. Writing is a defiant gesture we've long since gotten used to: where there was nothing, somebody put something, and now everybody sees it. For example, the prairie. That's the opening of Alvaro Enrigue's new novel, Now I Surrender. The words are spoken by Enrigue himself: He appears throughout the novel as a writer traveling on a road trip through the Southwest with his family."

"In the self-conscious hallucinatory tradition of historical novelists like E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo, Enrigue keeps intrusively reminding us that this overpacked tale of the past is something he's constructing, as much as resurrecting. And, like his predecessors, Enrigue subscribes to a paranoid reading of history."

"There's so much that 'official history' hasn't told us about 'how the West was won' that Enrique here works furiously to fill in some of the silences. The novel's most engrossing, if brutal, storyline follows a young Mexican woman named Camila. We first see her running into the prairie after an Apache raid wipes out everyone else living on her elderly husband's ranch."

Alvaro Enrigue's novel Now I Surrender opens with a philosophical statement about writing's power to create reality from nothing. The narrative follows Enrigue himself as a character traveling through the Southwest with his family, visiting sites central to Apache history. The novel employs self-conscious, hallucinatory techniques reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo, constantly reminding readers that history is constructed rather than simply recovered. Enrigue adopts a paranoid reading of history, believing official narratives deliberately omit crucial truths about Western expansion. The story includes a captivity narrative centered on Camila, a young Mexican woman caught in an Apache raid on her husband's ranch, serving as a vehicle to explore untold historical experiences on the Mexican-American borderlands.

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