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November 4, 2008
What we don’t know about people
The new Stewart O’Nan book, “Songs for the Missing” (Viking), sounds like it could be a standard mystery novel — a popular Ohio teen girl disappears in the first chapter and then we follow her frantic parents and friends as they wonder if Kim Larsen could have run away or was abducted by a stranger.
The premise is the same basic story that has dominated so many hours of cable TV news over the past decade — a pretty white girl vanishes with little or no trace and weeks (months?) are spent searching to no avail.
What’s really interesting about O’Nan’s novel, however, is that Kim’s disappearance is just the starting point for a much larger mystery that applies to all of us eventually — how do we cope with the loss of any loved one and how many aspects of their private lives were closed to us?
“Songs for the Missing” turns out to be about the various ways that family and friends go can go “missing” as life separates us and we find new lives in this huge and ever-mobile country of ours.
Fran and Ed Larsen spend the early chapters of the novel dealing with the police and mounting their own private search for Kim. The girl had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to going away to college in the fall when she failed to come home from her job (at a gas station/convenience store) one night.
Kim had a casual boyfriend nicknamed J.P. but both of them knew their relationship would probably end when they took off for different colleges in the fall.
In the search for clues, it becomes clear that Kim had a semi-secret life involving some drug use and a casual sexual relationship with a “dangerous” guy her parents and most of her friends wouldn't have approved of. This affair would probably not have amounted to anything if Kim had lived and started a new life at college.
The revelation leaves the survivors wondering what else they didn’t know about Kim and what that might say about their relationships with people they are still “close” to.
The unsettling plot is similar to that of the grossly underrated 1984 James Bridges movie “Mike’s Murder” in which a bank teller (played by Debra Winger) finds out much more than she wants to know when a casual lover is the victim of a drug enforcement killing.
O’Nan tells his powerful story of separation and loss in a very tight 287-pages. It’s another wonderful book in an extraordinary body of work that includes “Last Night at the Lobster,” “A Prayer for the Dying” and “The Circus Fire.”
Posted by Joe on November 4, 2008 6:26 PM
