Among the Missing: Stories

It's amazing, in a sad way, how many readers believe the short story genre to be either a training ground for the young novelist, or fiction light. If I had a nickel, as the saying goes, for every time someone has refused a story collection because she wanted something more "substantial," I'd be lolling around on a beach somewhere. These days, lots of great story collections are proving these people wrong. Dagoberto Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women," Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies," Justin Cronin's "Mary and O'Neill," Ha Jin's "Bridegroom" and Elizabeth Stuckey-French's "First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa" are some of the strongest collections in a half century-and all appeared in the last 3 years. Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" joins these fine collections. Suffused with Midwestern loneliness, Chaon's stories are sometimes raw, but always clever. The cover design, whose single image-a copper-colored bird cage against a white plane-which will explain itself in one of the stories, prepares us for the Zen-like clarity of the tales to follow, and the theme of those missing (as the bird cage is empty, its door swung eerily open). These stories are not like a Wally Lamb novel, crammed so full of images that it's nearly exhausting (and I say this having liked very much "She's Come Undone," by the way). Instead, there is a lot of mental white space in each story so that the scenes within stand as solitary and three dimensional as the bird cage on the cover. I can't imagine, for example, charging on to the next story after reading "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me;" the end of that story demands a breather. A few characters here are awakening out of deceptions they have created to keep their lives a bit tidy, and it is during these stories that the untidying begins. It is for this reason, then, that the book title is more than just one of the story titles having floated to the top. So many people in this book have gone missing. In the opening story, "Safety Man" a young widow works to keep going after her husband's death; in the title story the narrator's mother mysteriously disappears; in "Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By," the narrator continues to struggle with the aftermath of his childhood friend's disappearance 15 years earlier, and in "Passengers Remain Calm," a young man helps care for his nephew after the boy's father leaves home, likely for good. If it sounds as if these stories are a bit haunting, they are. The emotionally windswept characters in "Among the Missing" struggle to keep on keeping on, and in the face of the disappearance of others, confront absent parts of themselves as well. So, in this way there's a double dose of loss here-actual people are lost and then the characters left behind tally up their own losses besides. It's all a bit grim, but wonderful.Chaon writes clearly, directly. Sentences are re-read for their simple elegance, the stories re-read for their dark pleasure, and the characte

In most "good" short story collections, the "great"-to-"clunker" ratio seems to run about 50-50. Let's face it. It's damn hard to come up with a dozen good-and-different ideas, situations, and/or conflicts; people these situations with compelling and well-drawn characters; and provide some sort of satisfying conclusion in about 20 pages of copy. Many published collections even get by with one or two decent stories (aided by a fluke publication in "The NewYorker"), and the rest are not-ready-for-prime-time "filler." So, turning the pages of Dan Chaon's collection, "Among the Missing," you might feel like you've fallen into some great dream. Story after mind-blowing story, you keep waiting to wake-up to reality, to finally hit a clunker, but it never comes. "Among the Missing" truly deserves the superlative kudos blurbing its book jacket, (and it probably deserved the National Book Award, as well). There is something or someone "missing" from each of the stories in this perfectly-titled collection. Although not ghost stories, the characters here are plenty haunted - most by a deep sense of absence. "Safety Man" touchingly paints a young widow's dependency on an inflatable version of a man to protect her family and herself, now that her husband is gone. In "Passengers, Remain Calm," another man has abandoned his family, leaving his eight-year-old son fatherless until his conflicted younger brother steps into that role. In the wonderful, "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a woman is haunted by her imprisoned brother-in-law and the knowledge of his guilt, and takes-out her lonely rage on a nasty-mouthed parrot. And, in my favorite of these great stories - "Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By" - an adult man recalls and relives the disappearance of a teenage friend, and the secrets about the missing boy that he's never told, and never will tell. It's a great treat to find a short story that dazzles you, shocks you, touches you, makes you laugh and is written with elegance, power and beauty. Finding a dozen of them - as you do in Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" - is amazing. This collection is an amazing literary accomplishment.

This bittersweet collection by Dan Chaon is an emotional collage of stories related only by theme: someone, or something, is missing. What these characters miss most is understanding of their lives and those of their loved ones. Parents, in particular, can be touched physically but never truly known because their private moments are too far out of reach. Sometimes the absence in these stories is real: a missing family ("Among the Missing) or an arm ("Prothesis"). Mostly, however, the gaping hole is more internal, such as the difficult reality forgotten by the odd, overly imaginative boy in "Big Me." In these stories, people are strangers to one another, even though they might live together or profoundly and unwittingly affect the course of one another's lives.Chaon uses uncomplicated language that disarms the reader with its simplicity. His prose is so undemanding on the surface that the emotion undercurrents can sneak up on you, such as in "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom" when the final line of the story gives us a glimpse of the desperation, loneliness, and incomprehension of the protagonist: "He could have sworn in his heart that something terrible had happened to the world, and that everyone knew it but him."If you are a reader of short fiction, you won't be disappointed with AMONG THE MISSING.

Among the plethora of short story collections that thankfully are gracing our bookstores and libraries Dan Chaon's "Among the Missing" is among the best. These beautifully constructed, elegantly conceived and written stories are rare insights into the alienation and angst that blankets our population. For decades the families of America have been disintegrating by divorce, by substance abuse, by diminished parenting skills and we are left with a landscape peopled by young and middle-aged men and women who find it increasingly difficult to connect to their roots, to any semblance of family history, to significant realtionships - primarily because of the lack of consistent and reliable role models. This is not to suggest that Chaon is bent on telling depressing yarns that exceed the realm of "ususal people". Quite the contrary, he creates people and parent/child tales that sorrowfully inform us just how universal some of our own fears and insecurites are. Chaon is not a preachy author: he pulls us in to stories that hypnotize because of the astonishing degree of interestingly creative tales. He paints landscapes and houses and faces with such deft strokes that were it not for the fact that these stories are fiction he could be labelled a literary photo-realist. For all the inherent sadness in his characters we are never drowned in depression. Chaon can make sinister and sad memories somehow tender connections to people about whom we've grown to care very much. We all await his upcoming novel!

Alternately funny and heartbreaking, Dan Chaon's second collection is perhaps the most intelligent book to arrive this summer season. I highly recommend this book to readers of literary fiction. Among the Missing is a story collection not unlike Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. Both collections sustain throughout all their stories a cohesive sense of theme and atmosphere, but that having been said are neither repetitive nor uninteresting. Rather, Among the Missing is like a solid record album; every track(story) could be a hit, some songs are more danceable than others, but taken as a whole, it's a masterpiece.