We Disappear

It was nothing to write home about. The characters weren't very likeable so it was difficult to finish. I especially hated the mother. The plot was interesting enough, it was hard to predict the twists, which is why I gave the 3/5. (Tw for pedophilia)

WE DISAPPEAR is a great book. If "gay writing" has a future, then We Disappear is the prototype: because Heim presents us with a fully formed, layered character whose sexuality defines who he is, but it is not the issue. That Scott is gay is just a given (the author has named the character after himself), as far as he and the other characters are concerned. Isn't this the world we hope to create some day? The novel deals with desperation, an area where Heim is masterly- as we know from Mysterious Skin. A man who is desperately using drugs to keep his life on an even keel, and to avoid the black pit of depression; a dying woman who desperately clings to an obsession to keep herself alive. It is about how we carry impressions and hazy memories of early childhood incidents with us all our lives, and how they shape our lives without our even being aware of it. We Disappear is universal: although it is set in rural Kansas, it is no mere piece of Americana. I have never been to Kansas (except via The Wizard of Oz) but I related to these people. I know them. Don't we all have parents who are intimately familiar, and at the same time alien? We also know from Mysterious Skin that Heim knows how to structure a story, and round off a narrative so the reader never feels cheated at the end. He is a writer with skill and heart. Maybe the subject matter of Mysterious Skin obscured the latter quality for some people, but that won't be the case with this novel. It is the best work about losing a parent I have read since the equally engrossing but entirely different novel by the Australian Patrick White, "The Eye of the Storm".

Heim's done it again with We Disappear, only this may be his best effort yet. In this genre-busting novel, Heim explores many of the themes he's dealt with in past books such as Mysterious Skin and In Awe, only this time the eerieness has an all too human tinge. A great book.

In this exquisite rendering of a mother-son relationship, author Scott Heim moves his story from New York to Hutchinson, Kansas, and in the process, creates a vivid and convincing world, an emotional landscape that is both beautiful and also nightmarish as it recounts a son's battle with methamphetamines and a mother's battle with cancer. Living a drug-fuelled and depressed existence in New York, and working as a freelance writer writing copy for school textbooks, the narrator of this novel (and indeed the author's alter-ego) cannot help but be enticed back to his childhood home in Kansas when he receives an Express Mail envelope on his apartment doorstep. Contained within are detailed clippings from five separate Kansas newspapers, sent by Donna his sixty-year-old dying mother, advertising an upcoming book about disappeared people and her headstrong assertions that she has finally discovered what happened to her all those years ago. Now at the end of her life, with a long flood of memories have come back from when she was a little girl, Donna remembers a boy called Warren and a coloring book; and peaches and candy bars: "I think I understand now. I think I finally know what happened when I disappeared." With this message providing a continuous echoing loop in his ears, Scott returns to Hutchinson to find his mother's health failing, her obsession with the stories of missing children increasing her anxiety even as the walls of her kitchen and her truck are papered with the cut-out remnants of newspaper articles, in particular the headline and photograph of Henry Barradale, his strangled body recently found. Scott soon learns that Donna has since reading about the body; she'd been tracking the progress, calling police offices and searching for articles on him staying up late at night, the boy disappearing during the time Donna was drinking, those weeks and months so long before her real disease had begun to take hold of her. She wanted to get as close as she could, to understand the victims, "gone without a trace." But it is the beaded bracelet found on Henry's body, forever connecting her to the irreversibly of Henry's murder, the murdered boy finally stirring up something inside of her when she was a little girl someone had scooped her up in their car and taken her away, taking her right out of her everyday, "little girl life" Meanwhile, with the meth making him restless and with the Kansas towns offering him nothing, Scott drives with Donna on missions, watching her scribble street names on her notepads, recounting the lists of the dead. Only when he can finally see the links, that Scott himself looks like the pictures of these missing little boys, all the boys before and in between, can he unlock the mystery of his mother's disappearance. Heim steadily unfurls a multi-layered story of secret boxes and secret scrapbooks, little girls like Donna, boys like Warren, and a young man called Otis, trapped in a basement, even as the thre

For a mother and son, Donna and Scott's relationship is extremely close, almost too close, and from a certain angle WE DISAPPEAR plays like a Midwestern version of an early Cocteau novella, for Heim is good at the suffocating tension that grips them both in the same strangler's noose, as well as the loneliness they dominates their lives. (I suppose that's why Scott has no friends or ties--except for Gavin his drug dealer. For if he had someone else, anyone else, he wouldn't be so dependent on his mom I guess.) In consequence mother and son both suffer from severe emotional problems. "Our world had narrowed," Scott explains. "There was only mother and son." Scott is maintaining, but just barely, on a heavy diet of crystal meth that alleviates the boredom of a deadly writing job in Manhattan. Donna is, well, that's the mystery, one I don't want to give away, but the basic question is, WTF is wrong with Donna? One doesn't see Grace Zabriskie or Piper Laurie in the movies much any more, what a pity since either of them could have played Donna back in the day and I kept seeing Zabriskie as I read the book, dreading what was going to happen next, plunging ahead with the courage that overtakes one close to death, where society's restrictions fail to apply. On another level the book may be Heim's mashup of some elements in Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, for here Donna's best friend is called Dolores and there's plenty of that salty "I'm a bitch because a woman needs to be a bitch" dialogue we remember from King. And there's the secret buried deep in the mother's past, the one she tries to repress, tries sometimes to recall, familiar not only from DOLORES CLAIBORNE but from a hundred other small town melodramas like PEYTON PLACE and KINGS ROW. What distinguishes Heim's book from its predecessors is the skill with which he deconstructs the melodramatic tropes and clichés, skinning them back until a point is reached when they cede their traditional importance in favor of a poetic ambience of language, texture, atmosphere, and broken signifiers. Scott has always known of Donna's interest in vanished children, but for some reason never really made clear he has not known till now that this interest has stemmed from a shadowy episode of her own youth. (Heim does have some fun with the "recovered memory" narrative that dominated his first novel MYSTERIOUS SKIN.) Just when the back and forth begins to grow wearisome, for how many times can Scott try to guess which of the three contradictory back stories Donna gives out is correct?--just when this gets old, sly Heim unleashes a narrative move that will have you rubbing your eyes in shock. He is an ingenious storyteller: when his voice drops to a whisper, we just lean in closer. I was unable to stop touching the book even when circumstances prevented me from reading it. It has a weird, unearthly magic and his writing, from line to line, is inspired throughout. Heim is fearless in pursuit; he'll