First in a series that continues with Breaking Through, Reaching Out, and Taking Hold, The Circuit signals its autobiographical elements in some editions by including photographs of Jiménez himself on the cover. Along related lines, the dedication page for The Circuit salutes both Jiménez’s parents and his “seven sisters and brothers,” with a list of their names that pairs each with a parallel character from the narrative. Winner of multiple literary awards, this memoir-like novel forecasts its plot and setting in a descriptive subtitle, Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child.

The text’s opening chapter, “Under the Wire,” and its first full sentence situate the narrative as a Mexican family’s border-crossing search for a new home in the US: “’La frontera’ is a word I often heard when I was a child living in El Rancho Blanco, a small village nestled on barren, dry hills several miles north of Guadalajara, Mexico.” Jiménez carries readers along as his narrator struggles to acclimate to various new schools. His family’s situation is clearly shaped by the tenuousness of most members’ status within the U.S. (the father having legal work papers, but the mother and several children, born in Mexico, constantly at risk of being deported). But Jiménez also depicts Panchito’s family life in ways that invite strong empathy based on shared values and experiences, such as wanting to become more like an older sibling, chafing at the responsibility of caring for younger ones, and sometimes resisting parental priorities. Overall, with consummate skill, Jiménez cultivates a balance between celebrating specific features of his own ethnic identity (such as its vivid language patterns, sometimes rendered directly in Spanish, and its special foodways) and building intercultural connections.

The strategic choice of writing in a child’s voice brings important benefits to the narrative’s engagement with complex politics. Minor characters who’ve been brought to the California farm fields as braceros cue adult readers to think critically about how U.S. agriculture capitalized on the vulnerabilities of workers desperate for any kind of labor opportunity, however constrained. But Jiménez’s youthful narrator presents no critique of his own. Similarly, Jiménez shows us how Panchito struggles to master a second language via immersion in English-only classrooms. The novel vividly describes his concerted efforts to rise above such constraints on his schooling as the family’s constant moves on the harvest “circuit.” But his youthful viewpoint shields readers from having to confront overt analysis of how structural inequities impact educational policy as encountered by individual migrant children.

Like Paulette Jiles, Jiménez can call up poetic imagery to engage his readers. Everyday objects like Panchito’s treasured note pad become unpretentiously imbued with symbolic resonance. Panchito’s unfulfilled longing for a pet—even something as modest as a neighbor’s little goldfish—or his wishing for a warmer jacket–convey the precarious status of family finances concisely.  Simple, repeated descriptions carry affective weight. Coming back to one of their temporary homes after a day helping their father in field labor, Panchito and his older brother Roberto confront the familiar signs that another dislocation is at hand, just as they were beginning to find a few friends and settle in on the strawberry farm where the harvest is almost completed. “When I opened the front door to the shack,” Jiménez says in Panchito’s voice, “I stopped. Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard boxes…The thought of having to move… brought tears to my eyes. That night I could not sleep. I lay in bed thinking about how much I hated this move.”

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist has generated noteworthy scholarly analyses positioned within ongoing conversations about cosmopolitanism, comparative cultural studies, and post-colonial literatures. Whether Hamid’s more recent Exit West will garner similar multi-faceted (and sustained) success remains to be seen, but it’s already grabbed the attention of literary prize-givers.

Certainly, Exit West is a book of and for our current moment. If Hamid’s portrait of refugee trauma is mitigated somewhat by his love story (reminiscent in some ways of Mountain Windsong), the diasporic terrain’s being far more vaguely depicted, for the most part, separates it from specific migratory histories like Conley’s. When Hamid’s young protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, first meet, they are caught in a beleaguered but not-yet-uninhabitable space evoking today’s Syria. And in various points in the characters’ odyssey, they find temporary refuge on Greece’s Mykonos, in London, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perhaps because each of these episodes seems more focused on their psychological responses and the broader sociological unravelings exemplified at each stop, and despite Hamid’s naming of these various locales in their migrations, this progression of settings seems more a series of geographic pin drops than a vividly rendered sequence of realistic places-in-time, as in News of the World. Yet, for me, in spite of the sophisticated psychologies at play, their successive dislocations are not as emotionally debilitating as a reader, as young Panchito’s in The Circuit. Maybe that’s because Nadia and Saeed, as adults, however young, are choosing their moments of departure in each case, rather than having others direct their migratory paths.

I suspect Hamid sought to encourage just such a distancing between his characters’ moves in search of home and his readers’ responses. More allegory than history, more parable than adventure, more philosophical dystopia than personal story, Exit West seems to me, especially as I re-read in the intertextual nexus of my current syllabus’s other narratives, to be mandating a more distanced reflection—a careful consideration of where the world is headed, if we fail to see how all of us could soon be refugees. If nationalist xenophobia reigns supreme, Exit West shows, there may be no nations to safeguard, in the end, no exit for anyone, anywhere.

Hamid refuses to issue a direct call to political action or even to clarify if individual love can prevail. Maybe his is a wiser rhetorical stance than clarion pleas for intervention like the repeatedly circulated photograph of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach after a failed Mediterranean crossing. Perhaps a realism only somewhat tinged with fantasy will have a more telling impact.