18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ghosts of Eternal Silence, March 7, 2008
This review is from: We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)
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 go just about anywhere for the mot juste, and most of the time his reach pays off. A boy sits eating peanut brittle, the "crunches from his mouth like a complicated argument." Even his clunkers have an atavistic spell to them: of missing children, Scott tells us, "only the rare among them ever return alive." Only the rare among them? It's not a locution any English speaker has ever used, but it works, adding to the creepy Nabokovian vibe, reinforcing the connection between kidnapped children and rare specimens, like butterflies pinned to a wall.
Though there are no characters as appealing as the ruined boys of MYSTERIOUS SKIN, this novel makes up for it by snaring the reader in an unexpectedly tender byplay of addiction and loss. Scott's meth addiction is rendered realistically; he's a collection of aches and manias; he can't even brush his teeth for his gums bleed, and the chemical smell that engulfs him at all times sends a sulfurous cloud on the page. And yet he's doing pretty good compared to his mother, whose final mission, we discover, has been undertaken for a totally different reason than we thought. I'm being vague here because, well, I don't want to spoil the developments of the plot, but also because I write through a veil of tears. I lost my own mother last year, and yet I couldn't deal with her death in reality, it takes a great novel to bring it all home and make you say, yes, this was my life, this is life itself.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliance, April 26, 2008
This review is from: We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)
This novel, the third from Scott Heim, is expertly crafted and emotionally wrenching. It follows Scott, a meth-addicted freelance writer of textbooks, his mother Donna, dying from lymphoma and Dolores, a cancer survivor and Donna's "best friend in the whole world."
The other reviews go into detail regarding the plot of the novel, so I won't go into that here. I will only say that Mr. Heim's prose is brilliantly conceived, his characters real and affecting, the dialogue crisp and sure and the overall tone and mood of the book sure to hook the reader and provide a profound emotional experience.
Mr. Heim has always written beautiful prose to his disturbing, thought-provoking novels. With WE DISAPPEAR, he has taken his writing to a new level, providing deep, rich layers of characterization and plot and placing them into a very real-world context that is impossible to shrug off. This is, without a doubt, his most accessible novel to date and I hope with the very deepest of sincerity that he will continue to write, publish and gift the world with his imagination. There is a reason why Scott Heim is one of my favorite authors. He consistently gives his readers intelligent, real characters, and is never afraid to let them be who they are, regardless of how difficult it might be to stay with them. That honesty, that fearlessness, makes Mr. Heim a truly GREAT and gifted author.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hansel and Gretel Dare Not Tread, April 9, 2008
This review is from: We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.) (Paperback)
We Disappear is a haunting tale that is hard to shake after the last page. Readers will be stirred in their sleep, having been down a cold, gray road where Scott Heim weaves a tale about drugs, child abductions, and the complexities regarding family. A great, suspenseful book for an adventurous reader searching for more than light beach fare.
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