Songs for the Missing

I love Stewart O'Nan's writing. My two favorite books of his are A Prayer for the Dying and The Good Wife. A Prayer for the Dying, about a plague sweeping the midwest is almost beautiful. Because it is written in the second person, it brings home the shocking ending and I was ready to read it again. I love when authors try something a little unusual (and it works). But that was years ago. Now, I've just finished Songs for the Missing. 17 year old Kim disappears on her way to work one afternoon, early in the book, and the rest of the story is about her family and friends. This was a distant book, lacking the immediacy of A Prayer for the Dying, which was a little disconcerting given the subject matter--parents searching desperately for their missing child.

Some of this disconnect came from O'Nan's choice to have important pieces of the narrative (and the investigation) occur off-page. I kind of like that we never know the complete story between Kim and Wooze (creepy character/suspect/friend) so we're often left to imagine the worst. Her friends drift and life carries on. Her younger sister grows up and out of her shadow and still her parents search for her. O'Nan writes: ...they'd picked up the awkward yardstick used by new parents--sixteen months, seventeen. They counted backwards, snagged on that last day, which grew less and less present as the week by working week the rest of the world surged ahead.

I'd quibble with the word 'awkward" because what does that mean? But I agree with the metaphor. Like new parents, The Larsens are in their own world, and like any person who's experienced tragedy--true tragedy--they can hardly bear that the rest of life keeps moving.

When I'd started the book, I was afraid there would be no resolution at the end and I wasn't sure I could deal with that. I mean, it's not written as a thriller. It's more a kind of slow-moving look at suburban life in Ohio which happens to have this missing person at the center of it. The bookflap makes it sound like all sorts of secrets come out, but all you really see are a middle-aged couple trying to figure out their marriage, kids going off to college who are trying to figure out who they are, and a teenager who grows into a young lady. Life, I guess.

I do have a complaint about the cover picture, though. I'd picked it up, thinking it looked a lot like the waterholes I swam in, growing up in Vermont and New Hampshire, so I was a little surprised to find the book takes place in Ohio. I checked with my sister-in-law (expert on many things Ohio) to see if a scene like that were even possible in such a flat-seeming state. Without even seeing the picture, she was skeptical. Flat, flat, flat, she said. Oh well, I won't really blame O'Nan for that one. He lives in New England, too (Um, well, if Connecticut really counts as New England), and I suppose he has little to do with the covers of his books.