SHORT WAR

Two generations of Jewish Americans find themselves—and discover secrets—among friends and lovers in Latin America.

In the months leading up to the 1973 Chilean coup and the death of democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende, teenage American expat Gabriel Lazris meets Caro Ravest at a house party and falls for her immediately. It’s an unlikely match. Jewish and an avowed Communist, Gabriel attempts to woo Caro, a Chilean national and observant Catholic. A summer of socialist farming and fun in the haystacks yields a pregnancy that manages to surprise the protagonists. Fast forward to 2015 and a generation later: Gabriel and Caro’s daughter, Nina, who was brought up in the U.S., is working on a Ph.D. in communications when she arrives in Buenos Aires to do research for her dissertation. That’s where she discovers Guerra Eterna, a mythic underground work of nonfiction that complicates the Lazris family’s understanding of themselves and their history. While Meyer’s plot unfolds slowly, it’s stacked with factual history. Characters casually name-drop major players like Allende, but small details make the difference—Meyer includes minutiae as specific as the murder of Dan Mitrione, an American cop who taught Uruguayan police torture techniques. The novel’s compelling fidelity to history and its resonance with (un)certain current events in the U.S. (an increasingly popular school bully is a racist, xenophobic Holocaust denier—sound familiar?) absolves the intentionally awkward teen sex scenes (“The fabric—should he remove it?”) and occasionally shoehorned political dialectics.

A slow burn that absolutely ignites as the author deftly interweaves history, politics, and family.