Among the Missing [Hardcover]

Dan Chaon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 2001

In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon imagines today's family instinctively trying to stay together, only to find itself lost in the throes of a chaotic, modern world.

In "Safety Man," a young widow and her children become increasingly attached to an inflatable protector-doll, as the world outside seems to grow ever more threatening; "Big Me" follows a lonely, imaginative twelve-year-old boy who believes an older (slightly creepier) version of himself has moved in next door; In "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a man blinded by love for his imprisoned brother ignores the warnings of his distant wife and a talking parrot who both witness things he's never seen; and "Among the Missing" explores how the death of a family, found buckled in their car at the bottom of a lake, casts a shadow on a small town and intrudes upon the narrator's relationship with his aging mother.

A writer of enormous talent and emotional depth, Dan Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dan Chaon opens his new collection of stories with an epigraph from Raymond Carver: "Whatever this was all about, it was not a vain attempt--journey." This is pretty opaque stuff from Carver, a writer not much given to mystification. But it strikes just the right note for Chaon's assembly of characters, a group vaguely unsettled by life, trying to make the best of it. First and foremost, this is a book beset by moms. You get the feeling that the characters in Among the Missing never really had a chance to figure out the world, with these cryptic, uncommunicative women to care for them. In the title story, for example, a car is discovered at the bottom of a local lake, with an entire family drowned inside. The college-age narrator, however, is preoccupied by the more mundane puzzle of his parents' relationship. "Somehow," he recounts, "they'd stayed married for twenty years, and then, abruptly, somehow they'd decided to give up. It didn't quite make sense, and I looked at them, for a minute aware of the other mystery in my life. 'Do you want some soup?' my mother asked, as if I were a customer."

That's about as much as you'll ever get out of one of Chaon's mothers: soup. When not fielding their aging parents' passivity, these characters seem to spend a lot of time grappling with ghosts. The "missing" of the title story are, literally, gone. In "Safety Man," a widow comes to rely on one of those inflatable dolls meant to intimidate intruders. In "Prosthesis," a young wife and mother falls for a stranger with a missing arm; meanwhile, she watches her son grow up and away from her, "disappearing into his own thoughts and feelings." In the end, Chaon is the rare writer who deserves comparison to Carver: both write an affectless prose that takes on a surprisingly emotional life of its own. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

In the 12 quietly accomplished stories of his second collection, Chaon explores the complicated geography of human relationships, from the unintentional failures and minute betrayals of daily existence to the numbing grief caused by abandonment, disappearance or death. Specific and disquieting absences an uncle who killed himself, a mother who vanished, a friend who was kidnapped haunt the protagonists, and a series of metaphoric and literal stand-ins take the place of what's missing. In "Safety Man," a dummy intended for crime deterrence propped in the passenger seat, it looks like a male companion becomes a kind of surrogate husband for a young widow, and for her daughters, an inflatable father; in "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a woman caring for her incarcerated brother-in-law's macaw comes to loathe the bird, its ugly talk transforming it into a symbol of everything wrong and incomprehensible about him. By and large, Chaon's characters are citizens of the emotional hinterlands, lonely even when surrounded: "How did people go about falling in love, getting married, having families, living their lives?" Even those who think they know the answers recognize their powerlessness, such as the father who, looking into his son's eyes, thinks, "I am aware that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about it." And yet these stories are neither morbid nor even particularly melancholic. Singularly dedicated to an examination of all the profundity and strangeness of the quotidian, they are, in their best moments, unsettling, moving, even beautiful. (July 3)Forecast: A jacket blurb by Lorrie Moore and a five-city author tour may help sell this understated collection, which will be respectfully reviewed but may be overlooked on bookstore shelves.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1st edition (July 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345441621
• ISBN-13: 978-0345441621
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon's fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Without a Single Clunker, January 13, 2002

By 

R. Rand (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among the Missing (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Author with Finger on America's Pulse, September 21, 2001

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Among the Missing (Hardcover)

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!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You won't be disappointed!, November 1, 2001

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Among the Missing (Hardcover)

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.