Customer Reviews

We Disappear: A Novel (P.S.)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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".

The words "brave, honest, uncompromising, intimate, sincere, and uncomfortable" all come to mind when I think of Heim's work, and those words of course apply here with his latest novel, We Disappear.

With We Disappear, Heim delves further into themes which lay at the heart of his previous work: loss of innocence and the search for identity. Whereas Brian Lackey of Mysterious Skin struggled to discover the true meaning behind repressed childhood memories of abuse, Donna of We Disappear fights a battle against cancer while she attempts to piece together disjointed memories of being kidnapped at a young age. Of course, both Mysterious Skin and We Disappear are multi-tiered, with many narrative branches that cross and overlap, forming many layers. Mysterious Skin wasn't solely about Brain's search for answers, and that is the case here as well with Donna. Answers aren't always clear, and they usually don't come in the concise and defined form that we expect them to.

As far as layers go, I think that We Disappear may indeed be Heim's most intricate and complicated work to date. Yes, Donna is searching for answers about her past- and over the course of the novel, she and her son, Scott, investigate many cases which concern missing children. A boy named Otis appears to be a mystery unto his own self. Once the reader starts to peel away these layers however, one soon comes to understand that Warren isn't really the person at the heart of Donna's search. It's someone much closer to her, someone who doesn't even realize that he himself has disappeared.

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 threads of memory are intertwining and knotting, both the distant past and present with all of Donna's uncertain truths and partial, changeable lies.

Heim recounts heartfelt descriptions of the grim but beautiful Kansas landscape, a landscape that also reflects the bleak prospects for Donna as she gradually succumbs to her cancer. Her round of treatments making her drowsy and nauseous, even as she remains troubled by her son, with his forgetfulness and his mood swings, all caused by his crippling meth addiction. Most powerful is the author's account of this repetitive suffering of this woman who has played such a large part in Scott's life.

The tension builds as Heim steadily layers his story, adding memory and history as Donna's past steadily unfurls before us, and Donna's records of all of these children, who over the years have disappeared, do so much to propel the book's rock-hard realism and sense of urgency. But We Disappear is most powerful in its stunning transformation of a son who has "disappeared," not just into the darkness of crystal meth addiction, but also to a life that seems so far removed from the woman who has most influenced him.

Heim has beautifully woven his own family and life experiences into a work of art, until it becomes a reflection of the author's own self, almost refracted through a looking glass. Rich in complications of character and circumstance, this book also is deeply reflective of Heim's own talent as a writer and as an artist. In the end, it's a deeply compassionate portrait of a man who is seeking a measure of comfort and perhaps of solace and closure for his mother, and for himself. Mike Leonard March 08.

Very surealistic endeavor on Heim's behalf. Once one enters the book there is no turning back. Scott is a character you will want to embrace and take by the hand and just let him know he is loved.

Donna had her Warren...Heim has given his readers their Scott. BTW: The irony that the protagonist and the author are both named Scott hasn't been lost on me.

Scott Heim's We Disappear is another book that's been on my list and on my bookshelf for quite some time to read. I picked it up as an intro to my summer vacation since it was just under 300 pages, but finished it a week later before vacation even got started. I just couldn't put it down.

The storyline is a bit of a heartfelt family saga with some mystery tossed in. Scott, a meth addict living in New York, returns to hometown Kansas to care for his dying mother who has cancer. Mom is obsessed, and has been for a long time, with missing children cases, creating scrap books and plastering her walls with newspaper columns and photos. She wants Scott to help her interview people about missing children while pretending that they are collecting information for a book. However, his mother's real intent is to solve a mystery from her own past before the cancer causes her to "disappear," while also continuing her strange obsession. This may all sound a bit bizarre but Heim plays out the storyline in a very natural matter-of-fact way making it not seem as odd as it probably sounds on the back of the book or in my description here.

Another integral part that makes this such a good book is Heim's true talent for the written word. There were numerous passages and descriptions that were just haunting and beautiful. His metaphors are fresh and raw and he really digs under the skin of his characters to expose their fragility. Yes, they may sound crazy, high, drunk, stoned, or insane, and maybe they are. But the Kansas setting and the natural tone to their language makes them seem like the neighbors next door, or even nearby relatives. This is the first of Heim's books I've read, and I definitely want more.

The "mystery" aspect of the story and Scott's mom's background did keep me guessing for a while, but comes to a guessable and neat ending that may keep you questioning, but in the end, it is what it is. It at least makes you think and does give you some peace of mind. But the true genius here is how the author really breathed life into his characters, so much that I'm still thinking about them even though I finished the last page days ago. This is definitely a book I'll be suggesting to others for months to come, but my frayed copy is staying with me and not getting loaned out. I love a "good" book that stays with me long after I've finished it, both physically and emotionally, and this is one worth keeping!

Scott Heim's disorienting novel begins with ambitions limited, the case for drama strongly understated as wayward son returns to his Midwest home. But eventually, as we lose our trust in the narrator and the semi-disturbing "Kinko-the-kid-loving-clown" evocations reach a peak, the reader is dislodged from a place of certainty, or really any particular viewpoint. We inhabit the crazy drug-addled world fully. Although the occasional flat-footed dialogue mars this effort to mine the bends of disturbed minds unmoored by time or facts, these minor failures stand in stout in contrast to the poetic power of Heim's descriptions: a farmer's shirt smells of "popcorn" and the air in his mother's bedroom smells of dried apple and a young boy too like the narrator has "hit, criminal breath." The clutter in the narrator's mother's home not only set my teeth on edge; it also cluttered my mind and gave me a nervous, meth-like edge as I read. Heim's talent in this regard makes the effort to survive the loss of a narrator's trust entirely worth it, and the creepy brilliance of his descriptions make me eager for the next effort.