Maureen Corrigan

The detectives rarely succeed in any lasting way, but we readers love them because they try.

Before the captivity narrative about a Mexican woman abducted by the Apache in the mid-1800s, before the storyline about Geronimo's surrender, before the torrent of details about the life and peoples on the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the U.S., there's this first sentence.

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 Enrique's new novel called Now I Surrender.

The words are spoken by Enrique himself.

He appears throughout the novel as a writer traveling on a road trip through the Southwest with his family.

They're visiting sites that tell the story of the Apache fight for survival.

That Prospero-like opening gives readers fair warning about how defiantly challenging, occasionally overblown, and at times magical this epic novel is going to be.

In the self-conscious, hallucinatory tradition of historical novelists like E. L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo,

Enrique keeps intrusively reminding us that this overpacked tale of the past is something he's constructing as much as resurrecting.

And like his predecessors, Enrique subscribes to a paranoid reading of history.

As a character in Libra, DiLillo's novel about the Kennedy assassination says, This is what history consists of.

It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.

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.

To give you a sense of how immediate and visual Enrique's writing can be, here's the moment when the Apache catch up with Camila.