Customer Reviews

The Disappearance (Library Edition)

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the first paragraph of lush, gorgeous prose, in which Sigel describes Joshua running toward the light in The Hollow, I knew this would be a heartbreaking, yet uplifting book. The title is a bit misleading, as the mystery behind the disappearance of 14-year-old Dan Sandler plays second fiddle to its aftermath in the lives of his parents, Joshua and Nathalie. I knew what the resolution to the disappearance would be, but that's not the point, and the flawless pacing made The Disappearance extremely difficult to put down. The suspense is relentless, fueled by dips into the past that begin to shed frustrating shafts of light on a mystery that at first is in absolute darkness. No one saw anything the day that Dan disappeared. There is no physical evidence of any kind. Over weeks and months, as hope fades and Nathalie and Joshua fall apart both separately and as a family, pinpoints of light reveal murky connections and slim clues. I'm normally resigned to reading in fits and starts, but I desperately wanted to shut myself in my room and read this book in one go. I stayed up far too late to find out if Joshua and Nathalie would find closure, or at the very least, a way to move on.

The Sandlers are newcomers to their summer home of The Hollow, a hamlet outside the little town of Smithfield, Massachusetts. When they return to their real lives in New York after the disappearance, Joshua throws himself into work while maintaining a grueling schedule of investigation in The Hollow: calling the police chief twice a day, spending his weekends interrogating neighbors. Nathalie's cello sits untouched as she plunges into depression. Their opposing responses to uncertainty and grief push them further and further apart. The struggle of parents following a child's death or disappearance is a story that's been told a thousand times, but Sigel's portrayal is fresh and realistic, and Nathalie and Josh are shown so clearly that their agony is almost unbearable. It is a credit to Sigel that I, too, held out hope for a happy ending to Dan's disappearance.

The small town is drawn beautifully. The police chief, Sammons, is not the usual bumbling hick portrayed in small-town law enforcement. He is thorough and determined, and most importantly, he cares deeply and never gives up on finding answers for the Sandlers. Information about the townspeople is dribbled out in a realistic, non-intrusive fashion. Coupled with Sigel's gift for description, this makes for a richly nuanced image of The Hollow and its inhabitants.

In The Disappearance, Efrem Sigel has crafted a haunting, beautiful novel of tragedy's aftermath, with deeply human characters and a satisfying resolution. <a href="http://hollybooknotes.blogspot.com">On My Bookshelf</a>

I saw this book come up on the "coming soon" list and made a mental note to look out for it, but when someone sent it to me, I lept at it! It sounded a little different than what this genre usually entails and it did not disappoint. The book itself moves a little slowly, but not in a bad way... it takes you through this couple's heartaches. It's somewhat muted, but completely and utterly engaging. It didn't make me cry or anything, but it gripped my heart and squeezed for all it was worth. It was a tough one, in that respect. I felt like I was with the father a lot, the desperate search, the look back at what he should have done, what he did wrong, what he did right, what he could have done differently. It was almost... manic? Is that the word? It was... sad.

The way the book is written is a subtle story, of love, of loss, of remorse, of letting go and moving on and looking behind. This beautifully written, reading it you know how it must go along, but you keep waiting and hoping for something different. I don't want to spoil it too much, but this is a book you experience more than read.

I don't hesitate in recommending this book. It's a really good book and I'm happy that I got the chance to read it. It's rough, but it hits home with a reality that, well, it smacks you in the face. No one likes to think of things like this, but the harsh reality is that it happens and this is a story of how one couple dealt with it. The good - and the not so good.

Get this. It's good.

Sigel creates a heart-rending and emotional page-turning novel of two parents trying to deal with every parent's worst nightmare come true: a child goes missing and is found months later dead. The parents each deal with the tragedy in different ways: The two suffer alone, silently: They grow apart. Sigel's wonderful descriptions are touching, suspenseful. I felt their angst and pain as they try to come to terms with their grief and the uncertainty of their son's disappearance. The parents are so real that I could not help but identify with them and want to help.

Sigel is a masterful story teller: He's equally wonderful in setting the scene of the town the where the tragedy takes place and in developing the colorful characters of the townspeople. I can see the forest, the house they lived in. I have met the neighbors. This is not a run-of-the-mill whodunit -- the characters are too real for that. Indeed, I was very uncomfortable picking up this novel, but did so because Sigel's short stories are absolutely wonderful and I wanted to see how he would write a novel. I was not disappointed. For two days [I could not put the book down!]. I had to find out what happened to their son and see if the parents would remain together and move on. 'Disappearance is a great read!!

Basic Overview

The Disappearance is about every parent's worst nightmare -- the unexplained disappearance of a child. The Sandler family is a happy, affluent family spending the summer in the small Massachusetts town of Smithfield. The two parents -- Joshua and Nathalie -- dote on their 14-year-old son Daniel. Nathalie thrives as a cellist for the New York Philharmonic. Joshua has taken over the family business and made it successful -- enough so that he is able to invest in a new resort being built near Smithfield. And Daniel is a parent's dream -- smart, athletic, personable. Although Daniel and Joshua have begun to butt heads as Daniel begins to establish himself as his own man, the family is essential happy and loving. So, one ordinary afternoon, when Joshua and Nathalie run a mundane errand into town and leave Daniel behind, they have no reason to think twice about it. But when they return, Daniel is gone. With no real reason to worry, they believe he has gone out with his friends or for a walk. But as the hours pass and Daniel doesn't show up, Joshua and Nathalie begin to worry. They begin calling Dan's friends, checking with neighbors and searching their small town. But Daniel doesn't come home, and Joshua and Nathalie become increasingly concerned and frantic. They call the police, and the search for Daniel begins in earnest. Days pass and no trace of Daniel is found. Joshua -- increasingly frustrated by the police's failure to find his son -- takes matters into his own hands and begins conducting his own investigation. He is unable to sit still knowing that Daniel might be out there somewhere. And as days turn to weeks and weeks into months, Joshua becomes obsessed with finding answers. He is always in motion, always looking for new avenues to explore. By contrast, Nathalie shuts down -- barely able to take care of herself. Her beloved cello sits neglected. She drops out of life. The strain on their marriage takes a toll. And, then, the mystery of what happened to Daniel is solved -- but is it too late for Joshua and Nathalie?

My Thoughts

When I first started this book, I thought I was getting a standard-issue whodunit: "A boy goes missing. What happened to him?" But I found so much more. The mystery of what happened to Daniel is really almost secondary to the primary story -- which is how Daniel's disappearance affects Joshua, Nathalie and their marriage. In fact, the mechanics of solving the mystery of what happened to Daniel were the least satisfying aspects of the book. Of course you want to know what happened, but I felt the driving force of the book is not solving this mystery. Instead, the book is a well-written character study of Joshua and Nathalie and how Daniel's disappearance affects them.

I've always read that the death or disappearance of a child usually affects each parent differently -- to the point where marriages are often destroyed rather than cemented by a common grief. Joshua's need to take action contrasts strongly with Nathalie's withdrawal from the world. Their marriage suffers, and the mystery of whether they would be able to find each other again was as compelling to me as finding out what happened to Daniel. This was a well-written character study of how grief and tragedy affect people differently and how such a traumatic event can affect even the strongest marriage.

I think it is also worth mentioning that the town of Smithfield is a bit of a character of its own. It is an effective setting for this book, and it provided Sigel with the opportunity to have Joshua do a bit of his own detective work without that seeming unrealistic. Also, I liked how the author wrote about Nathalie and her love for her music. It made me wonder if he was a bit of a musician himself.

Finally, it goes without saying that a book like this makes you think about your own reactions if something like this happened to your own child. I never want to go through what this family did, and I don't know if I would react more like Joshua or Nathalie. I hope I never find out.

Final Thoughts

The Disappearance was a well-written character study of parents dealing with the disappearance of a child. Although the mystery of the disappearance is a major part of the book, the book is more of an examination into a marriage and two good parents dealing with a terrible tragedy. I found the ending to be satisfying. However, if you are looking for a riveting "whodunit" type of mystery, I don't think this book would satisfy you.

An Excerpt from the Book

"He thinks of Dan in that moment and as often happens, a soothing calm--the calm of cloistered monastery walls, of shady hideaways in meandering gardens--takes hold. It's as if Dan has been gone on a long trip and the distance between them is teaching him to understand and cherish his son. In his brain he knows that, like any 14-year-old, Dan was a hormonal, secretive teenager. Surely Dan must have resented Joshua's oversight, benevolent or not; when he got together with his buddies, surely he must have articulated the common disdain for cloddish parents and their hopeless ways. But in Joshua's memory the specifics of family discord soften, and the Daniel who emerges is mature and self-aware."

"Joshua does not wallow in these edited memories but merely accepts what they grant him, a brief respite from the agony of uncertainty. It is uncertainty that bears down on him like a rock from which he cannot extricate himself, an uncertainly far worse than whatever horrible thing transpired. What happened, happened, Joshua tells himself over and over; it's in the past. Not knowing what happened contaminates the present as well. And yet, uncertainty also allows him to entertain the possibility of a miracle that will restore their son to them. He will never speak of such an eventuality, won't even let his mind entertain it and yet, absent proof, it exists as an incalculably small possibility, as if he could sift every grain of sand on a wide beach and find the one that bears the singular ivory white hue he seeks."

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It's hard to really care about the parents, and parts of the story are unbelievable in the extreme.

This book is very well written. The plot is thoughtful and carefully developed, with just enough unexpectedness to still be plausible and exciting. The attention to detail also was amazing.

I found, however, that the main characters, both Joshua and Natalie, possess a kind of personal moral perfection that strains credulity. I also felt the depiction of their life together is too hedonistic and banal. Here is a lady in the New York Philharmonic, who presumably travels the world performing with the greatest artists in the world, yet whose circle of friends seems parochially narrow to the extreme. Kind of like a Jewish borscht belt family made good. But still content to hang out with the boring and vapid types from White Plains, the Jewish yuppie crowd.

Another thing that perturbed me is their total lack of compassion for the teenagers who had been friends with their son. Consider this: the author is very judgmental about one girl's pregnancy and subsequent abortion and scornful about the possible identity of the father; yet he fairly exults about Joshua's affair with one of the townspeople, which occurs in the midst of his wife's deep and inconsolable grief about the disappearance of their son. Joshua never gets caught in this affair, never has to face an accusing question from his wife, and just the opposite: the affair reveals to Joshua an important clue about his son's disappearance. The conclusion: Joshua can be forgiven any moral wrong, while the low life townies he is forced to live with in Smithfield cannot be forgiven any moral wrong at all!

Some things that I found implausible:

1. Why would Joshua and Nathalie choose to live in such a hick place as Smithfield? It seems as though this locale was chosen simply to highlight the supposed moral superiority of these New York Jewish Yuppies as compared to the simple villagers of Western Massachusetts. It seems contrived to the extreme.

2. How could Joshua manage to browbeat the DA to issue a warrant to inspect a building that Joshua had illegally broken into? And how likely was it for Joshua to have cracked the computer login code?

3. Similarly, how could Joshua have persuaded the bank manager to reveal to him confidential client information?

All these are fine examples of how the author maneuvers Joshua Sandler onto a ridiculously high moral plane, a man incapable of doing wrong, whose own crimes of adultery and breaking and entering magically are transformed into game winning strategic moves. And all the while breathing invective and scorn at the folly of the teenagers who were friends with his son, who seems content to relish leaving the small town teenagers to fester in their guilt while upholding Joshua and Nathalie (and by implication their larger collection of friends and relatives) as morally unstained near-perfect human beings. The undertone of Jewish supremacism is barely concealed and painfully obvious.

There is another disturbing implication, common among the Jewish communities I have lived in over the years: whatever wrongs a Jew may commit are always in reaction to much worse wrongs that were perpetrated against him by Gentiles. This seems to be the reason the author speaks nary a condemning word about Joshua's affair: he was just a victim of circumstances, caused by lowlife townie teenagers and others in the village.

He also evinces little to no sympathy for the very real economic hardship facing most Americans (except of course for the Jewish Yuppie crowd) these days: (1) he notes with total detachment the fact that good paying, secure aerospace jobs were been replaced by low paying, oppressive, and insecure service jobs; (2) he notes almost with derision the jealousy the teenagers would naturally be expected to feel about the "rich New York kid" in their midst, sharing with them all his dreams, while they are locked into a stagnant boring existence.

For these reasons I have to conclude that this book, whatever its obvious merits, suffers from a lack of a universalized moral vision and from an oppressive and overbearing and patronizing form of Jewish arrogance and condescension.

I hope and pray that the author will be able to develop a broader moral vision that will enable him to go beyond these unfortunate limitations on his raw literary talent.