Customer Reviews

Songs for the Missing: A Novel

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1 star:		(7)

 

 

Meet Kim Larsen. She is eighteen years old, pretty and popular, and about a month away from leaving for college and the wider world. She can hardly wait. Like most small town kids, she and her friends chafe from the sameness and boredom of daily life. They drink more than they should and experiment a bit with drugs. But they are good kids at heart and are so looking forward to going away, being on their own, growing up.

Then, somewhere in the short distance between her home and her workplace, she seemingly vanishes into thin air. No trace of her, or her car. No one has seen anything. She's just gone. This is the story of those left behind. The author changes the point of view for each chapter and the reader feels the reaction of each person: Mom, Dad, sister, best friend, boyfriend. We see how they react and try to cope with the reality of Kim's loss.

Her Mom Fran gets organized, makes lists, makes calls, starts a website, talks to the press.

Her Dad Ed gets outside, taking the lead in the numerous searches that start immediately and continue for months.

Her younger sister Lindsay retreats into herself, a book, her I-Pod, the tv, the computer. Anything to keep people away. Especially her parents who can't resist the impulse to smother their remaining child with protectiveness. More than anyone else, this is her story.

Young girls disappear every day, not only in the US but around the world. Many are never seen again and their fates are often never known. Songs for the Missing gives you a glimpse of the flattening anguish and grief that the loved ones suffer when this happens.

Despite the emotional subject matter, this book is a surprisingly easy read. The author's smooth and comfortable style allow the reader to sink into the story, empathize with the characters, be a member of that family. Stewart O'Nan is a talented writer who has written a book that will resonate long after you finish it.

What would do if your teen aged daughter disappeared without a trace? When--if ever--do you stop looking for her?

This is exactly what happens to Kim Larsen, age 18, popular, a small town Ohio girl just weeks before she is to leave for college. She spends an afternoon at the lake with her friends then never shows up for work that evening and is never seen again. It is not until the next morning that her parents, and 15 year old sister, realize Kim is missing.

The book starts out like a mystery, but it soon becomes very much a character study about how people act when a family is in crisis. When one person keeps themselves busy and involved every minute of the day, others may turn inward and shut the world out. What if normal grieving? Is there such a thing? Do remaining family members grow closer or more distant in times of crisis such as this. These are the questions I found myself thinking about as I read this book.

I expected that this book would be more of a mystery. So initially I was a bit disappointed, but it still was very very well written, and I am not sorry that I read it.

O'Nan is a really good author, and even when his books are not necessarily what you might have expected, I have always found them enjoyable.

Reading "Songs for the Missing" wasn't easy, in fact it was excruciating - the subject matter centering on a young girl's disappearance and the effect on her family, friends and community is heartrending and it was painful to read about these people coping with their loss and grief.

When 18-year-old Kim Larsen disappears from her small Ohio town of Kingsville, her family, friends and community are mobilized to quick action. But then time passes, and those close to Kim realise they need to make a conscientious attempt at getting back to a semblance of normality - her parents, her sister [who finds herself being overshadowed by her beautiful, popular sister even when she's missing], Kim's boyfriend, friends etc - the book basically follows what happens to people when someone they know goes missing, with no real resolution.

This is not a traditional thriller or crime procedural - there's not a set of clues that helps one determine Kim's fate. On the contrary, it's a searing narrative with characters that are very real and who try to put their lives together despite a great tragedy.

I really can't put my finger on this one...

On one hand, I know the author was creating a sense of tedium trying to convey the empty and hopeless feeling of Kim's family.

On the other hand, this book was soooooooo boring. Like another reviewer said, I WANT TO KNOW more about Kim's friends and the secrets they had with the ex-marine. You might say O'Nan didn't fill us in because he wanted to leave us with wondering (much like Kim's parents)...maybe,I don't know.....BUT, if that was the case, then why did he spend countless pages detailing some girl's quest to put her dead mother's house on the market for 95k instead of the 89k that Ed suggested? How does that contribute to the story?

I know, I know...I just don't get it. The book is supposed to show us how the world keeps dragging along at its slow and uneventful pace even after a horrible abduction...but I could barely finish this one.

Even the last ten pages...hoping for a haunting conclusion, left me instead with nothing. *shrugs*

Like "Last Night at the Lobster" and "Wish you Were Here," the thing that most awed me about the latest from O'Nan is his stunning ability to once again make his characters' reactions to events that do NOT occur so real...and riveting. Without revealing anything about them that might ruin your reading experience, suffice it to say that each novel is propelled by the way in which its characters cope not with an important occurence, but instead with the ongoing void left where that hoped-for event failed to materialize. If you're into plot-driven fiction, look to another author (though O'Nan's "Prayer for the Dying" might be his one exception). But if you enjoy being drawn into a fictional world so utterly lifelike in its unwillingness to provide clarity, closure or resolution that you ache with empathy for everyone involved, this is brilliant literature.

As with Last Night at the Lobster, I started Songs for the Missing and could not do anything else until I had followed the characters to the place where O'Nan chose to leave them. His style is warm and intimate, without lapsing into sentimentality. While his work is always filled with insights into love, memory, family ties, aging, and human frailty, these are presented quietly, with soft colors and smooth strokes.

What I appreciate most about O'Nan is that he seems interested in telling a good story. Period. He does not seek to impress the reader with his vocabulary, facility with words, or sly observations but, instead, lets the reader place all of his/her attention on the characters and their experiences of the world(s) they inhabit.

Stewart O'Nan's "Songs for the Missing" introduces us to the "main" character, Kim in Chapter 1 and very quickly takes her away. That's right, Kim goes missing. What follows is vintage O'Nan. The characters who were left behind (Kim's mom, Kim's dad, her sister Lindsey, her boyfriend J.P., etc.) inhabit a curious half-life in which time as it relates to Kim stops while their lives continue. Indeed, the saga of Kim's disappearance takes on a life of its own.

O'Nan's style is spare and the story is character driven rather than plot driven. What makes O'Nan's books so compelling is the meticulous rendering of the setting. In "Songs for the Missing," that setting is Ashtabula County, Ohio. O'Nan conducts a great deal of research in order to be as authentic as possible.

There is no "happy ending" for "Songs for the Missing" but a satisfying ending nonetheless.

This novel has received much acclaim for its unsparing, detailed dissection of the aftermath of a vital young woman's disappearance from her Midwestern town, yet another sad statistic in a growing body of such victims. The country has long been fascinated with the stories of such people, most often the objects of foul play; but as many families know, closure is infrequent and arbitrary, more likely endless years of never knowing the fate of a loved one. Such is the tragedy of Kim Larsen, a teen about to leave for college who disappears on her way to work one scorching summer afternoon, her family soon trapped in an endless cycle of hope and grief. It is this slow agony that O'Nan captures so perfectly, the first day stretching into months, a year, the family falling into what has become a ritual of search parties, fund-raising events and public service requests for the public's support.

While Kim's teenaged friends keep their own counsel, thereby hindering the immediate investigation, Kim's mother, father and younger sister experience the immediate trauma of a family member who simply never comes home again. Whatever trouble the teens are hiding- and this is never fully revealed- the fact causes a rift between Kim's family and friends that remains unresolved by the close of the novel, only one of the subtle reminders that often there simply are no answers. Not so the response of the family and community in crisis, everyone turning out for search parties, posting missing notices, a rush of press interviews, anything to increase awareness in those first critical hours.

The novel's content is its strength and the cause of my ambivalence, an endless diary of endurance as parents devote themselves to the search for their daughter, nearly obliterating life as they have known it. The familiar is rendered obsolete as one of them literally vanishes from the family unit, days become dreary rounds of details, an operation that allows little time for grieving. Hence my ambivalence: the endless trivia of searching for Kim leaches passion and personality from the characters, automatons in their activities, building an effective organization. In the end, Fran, Ed and fifteen-year-old Lindsay are no different than any of us, normal lives forever destroyed by a stunning, irreparable loss. O'Nan asks nothing more of his characters than that they survive. The result is the flat, desperate day-to-day endurance of reality, the detritus of daily duty in black and white without color or passion, Kim's family as victimized as their daughter and sister. Luan Gaines/ 2009.

In "Songs for the Missing" O'Nan slips easily into the many different characters' points of view--from 18-year-old Kim, the victim in the book, to her 15-year-old sister Lindsey to Fran, the mother, and, Ed, the father. In fact, it is a wonderful book to teach the technique of POV writing, and I plan to use it in my future writing classes.

Admittedly, I was reluctant to pick up the book, which takes on the heartbreak topic of a kidnapped child. When I began to read the book, I read each page with fervor. Even when I had to lay the book down, my mind obsessed. What has happened to Kim? Will she be found? What will happen to the family?

Meanwhile, portions of "Songs for the Missing" read like a laundry list. How exactly does a family go on with life's mundane agenda in the eye of suffering such heartbreak? Apparently, at least as portrayed in this book, they do--remarkably well. O'Nan is a genius at portraying the survival mode that people who experience such a catastrophic event must live in order to, yes, survive. Additionally, the author transforms each character until he manages to redefine them completely.

He also provides great insight into the Ohio community where the story takes places. The fervent rally of forces that gather for the mission to find Kim only wanes in time with the citizens poking their own heads back into their narrow sandbox of life.

O'Nan's ending is a masterful surprise. Although disturbing, and perplexing, it gives the reader a sense of closure...but not enough for the story to tug on the reader's heartstrings long after the close of the book.

O'Nan is one of the very best novelists writing today, in part because he has the courage to choose truth over convention every single time. Here he takes a story that's become a tired and sensational fixture on American television-- the random murder/disappearance of a young woman, presumably at the hands of a serial killer--and then systematically and pitilessly reveals what such a loss is actually like for her family and friends. The grimness of the mundane, without respite-- putting up fliers, making phone calls, waiting most of all--is precisely the point. It's both a brutal and profound book, true to the world as it is, made all the colder by the warmth of the characters. In the past he's ventured into the gothic and the fantastic, to good effect, but in both this novel and in Last Night at the Lobster he shows how powerful unadorned realism, in the right hands, can be.