A Quickie: Lin Enger's The High Divide

I'm in that frantic state some of us reach when preparing to hit the road: dashing from room to room, grabbing clothes and stuffing them willy nilly into a duffel bag with one hand, while watering houseplants with the other hand. Whirling around my legs are the dogs, hysterical now that the quilt they use when I take them along has been put in the car.

Before we lay rubber down the driveway, I want to tell you about a book I read last night, Lin Enger's The High Divide (Algonquin Books, September 2014). It's about a man named Ulysses Pope, who disappears from his home on the Wisconsin prairie on a quest for redemption, and the quests of his wife and their two young sons to find him.

Their 1886 journeys are traceable on a sketched map of the State of Minnesota and the Dakota and Montana Territories in the book's front. Ten years earlier, Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment blundered into the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana. Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe Indians have been driven onto reservations, where promised provisions from the U.S. government don't always arrive. Buffalo Bill's Wild West show is making annual appearances. Buffalo, which once roamed the West in uncountable herds, have been shot for sport from passing trains and killed by market hunters––and now number in the hundreds.

The disappearance of Ulysses is related to his baptism by an itinerate preacher. Rather than feeling purged, Ulysses feels called to answer for more than his mortal soul. He and his Danish wife, Gretta, love each other, but Ulysses isn't by nature a talker, and Gretta doesn't by nature invite him to confide. While Ulysses feels guilty decades later over the accidental death of a girl's collie, the beautiful and strong-willed Gretta has "a ruthless capacity for self-protection," rarely allowing herself to think about her losses or committing her sympathies beyond a point at which they might cause her damage. Without Ulysses, Gretta looks for more work. Six weeks go by, and then her sons, 16-year-old Eli and his sickly younger brother, Danny, take off without a word. Gretta, abandoned by most of her friends and her men, and hounded for money and favors by the repulsive Mead Fogarty, owner of the title on the Popes' house, has had enough. She heads out to find Ulysses, Eli, and Danny––and discovers how little she knows about the man she calls her husband.

The High Divide is an exploration of guilt and redemption, the corrosive character of terrible secrets, the nature of home, and the costs of racial hatred and traditional gender roles, set against the backdrop of the American West in the 1800s. It casts several historical events in such personal terms that it brought me to tears. There's no mistaking the western nature of this gripping book, but you don't need to love westerns to enjoy it. Its lyrical writing describes a man with a face "like a baked apple, riven and dark, who spent the better part of an hour cleaning his teeth with a length of horsehair and then his toenails with a Bowie knife." A boy reminds Gretta of a muskrat, with a "nose flat against his face and a mouth perennially ajar, as if he lacked the energy to close it." Stars in the western sky are so thick "some giant hand might have skimmed cream from the pail and tossed it up against the firmament."

The High Divide reminded me a bit of Patrick deWitt's Booker-shortlisted novel, The Sisters Brothers (reviewed here), and James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (see review here) in their depictions of how tough life could be in earlier America. It's too bad some folks made it worse than tough.

Summer's Last Gasp

Where did the summer go? Part of me is relieved we're headed back to school, but another part wants one more trip to the lake with family, friends, board games and good books. At the very least, we deserve a few more weeks of reading on the patio before Labor Day, when we settle down for the seriousness of fall and winter.

Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (Harper, June 2014) is perfect for a season that is winding down. Healey's narrator is Maud Horsham, a mother and grandmother who survived the London Blitz, but is now descending into dementia. She lives alone and copes with the help of daily visits from a carer and her harried, but loving daughter, Helen. Maud also writes endless reminder notes to herself. Many of them involve her best friend, Elizabeth, who is no longer to be found at the house she shared with her disagreeable son. Despite Maud's visits to the police and the concerns she voices to Helen, no one seems to care about the missing Elizabeth.

This reminds Maud of the police reaction to the disappearance of her older sister, Sukey, shortly after World War II, and we follow her increasingly scrambled thoughts to the 1940s, where her memory is clearer. Then, she was 15 and living with her parents and a boarder who worked as a milkman. When the beautiful Sukey disappeared, she was married to Frank, a moving man experienced with the black market. Maud's narration is remarkable in its weaving in and out of its 1940s conciseness and its increasingly helter-skelter present. If Maud had a less loyal family, Elizabeth Is Missing would be heartbreaking reading. As is, it's an unsentimental but tender and insightful look at the disappearance of an aging woman's memory and identity.

John Scalzi also looks at aging, memory and identity in his book of science fiction, Old Man's War (Tor, 2005). The twilight years of John Perry, however, are light years removed from Maud Horsham's. John celebrates his 75th birthday by paying respects to his deceased wife and then enlisting in the army, now called the Colonial Defense Force. The CDF is full of old men and women, because their expertise is valued. They defend the Earth, now considered the sticks, but they also seek to colonize what little is left of unclaimed inhabitable outer space real estate. It almost goes without saying that other planets seek to colonize it too. Wars over colonization have been waged for years.

Upon enlistment, CDF soldiers are given youthful bodies. If they survive two years of service, they are given homestead claims on a colony planet. They are forbidden to return to Earth. Of course, the war they have to survive is unlike anything they expect. Scalzi's writing is witty and offbeat and his unusual elderly heroes are a welcome change as we head for a season of autumn colors and falling leaves.

Book Review of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Secrets can make delightful surprises. Check under the tree on Christmas morning. But you don't need to turn over a rock to find another kind of surprise. You can pick up Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, in which there are more hidden things awaiting discovery than those offered by the treasure-hunt clues Amy always leaves her husband, Nick Dunne, on their wedding anniversaries. On their fifth anniversary, Nick has a more serious puzzle to solve. He returns home to find Amy's declawed cat outdoors, the front door wide open, the iron still plugged in, the tea kettle burning, imperfectly mopped up blood in the kitchen and the living room appearing as if a cyclone had dropped in. And Amy herself? Gone.

When the book opens, narrator Nick is reflecting on his wife's pretty head. The shape of it. What's inside of it. In fact, he says the question he's asked most often during their marriage, if not out loud, is "What are you thinking, Amy?"

Amy Elliott inspired her child-psychologist parents' children's book series about a perfect girl named Amazing Amy. The books always ended with a multiple-choice question about what Amy would do in the circumstances. Perhaps it isn't surprising that when Amy grows up, she earns a master's degree in psychology and writes personality quizzes for women's magazines. She doesn't need to work, though, because Amazing Amy amassed a nice trust fund. This comes in handy when Nick, a magazine writer, loses his job and Amy loses hers shortly thereafter. They spend weeks in their pajamas, aimlessly roaming their Brooklyn brownstone, until Nick receives a call from his twin sister, Margo, in North Carthage, Missouri. Nick and Margo are so close he thinks of her as "mytwingo." Their mother has cancer and maybe six months to live. Nick isn't fond of his father, who's so full of fury his teeth grinding can be heard across the room, and who now lives in an assisted living center, but Nick has always loved his mother. Without consulting Amy, Nick promises Go that they'll move back to his childhood home to help Go cope.

Nick had a boyhood job playing Huck Finn in Hannibal, Missouri.

Once in Missouri, Nick and Go borrow $80,000 from Amy, from her trust fund, to open a bar. Nick figures people will always need a drink and Amy can take her time to figure out what she wants to do. This sounds like a workable plan, but what's the saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men? This one doesn't adequately take personalities into account. At one time, Go tells Nick, "You'd literally lie, cheat, and steal––hell, kill––to convince people you are a good guy." He craves approval and can't deal with angry or tearful women. This is when he feels his father's rage rise up. After Amy is gone, Nick confides to the reader: Amy could tell you about that, if she were here.

Early little asides like that one unsettle the reader. So do Nick's descriptions of a new, brittle, bitter Amy who was no longer his wife "but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers . . . untrained in the intricate dangerous work of solving Amy." One reads Nick's account in chapters dated "The Day of," "Six Days Gone," etc.

Given that Nick has called Amy "the girl with an explanation for everything," it's instructive to read Amy's sporadic diary entries, which alternate with Nick's narrative chapters. Amy is articulate and opinionated, insightful and funny. Her diary begins on January 8, 2005, the day she meets Nick ("a great, gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy"). Amy describes her parents' marriage as so "cherishing" that she feels like a useless appendage who's pressured to be perfect. The perfect girl becomes the perfect girlfriend and the perfect wife for the perfect man. Amy doesn't force Nick to do pointless tasks, and make myriad sacrifices to prove his love for her like other women whose husbands perform like dancing monkeys. The move to Missouri changes them and their marriage. The competitiveness and relentless achieving that made her at home in New York City are greeted with "open-palmed acceptance and maybe a bit of pity" in Missouri. Her husband and his twin sister often make her feel like a third wheel. By the morning of Nick and Amy's fifth wedding anniversary, they have been in Carthage two years. What happens then?

Amy says Tom Petty's music has accompanied everything important in her life.

Gillian Flynn photo by Heidi Jo Brady

Gone Girl has appeared on best-selling lists since its publication in June 2012 by Crown. There are good reasons for the book's popularity. It's a psychological feast about love and violence and a treatise about various types of manipulation. Who can know the truth of a marriage? If Flynn didn't enjoy writing it, she fooled me. Her characters revel in themselves and their admissions to the reader. I'm not sure what true-life disappearance inspired Flynn, but some elements of Nick's story after he calls the cops to report his wife missing resemble real events, like the 2002 disappearance of Laci Peterson in Modesto, California.

Carthage's fictional cops, Det. Rhonda Boney ("brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly") and her partner, Det. Jim Gilpin (who looks like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee but who smells of Dial soap instead) organize a search and a press conference. Nick's in-laws swoop into town to set up a Find Amy Dunne headquarters at the Days Inn, and all kinds of people seep out of the woodwork to help. Nick decides his journalist background qualifies him to investigate possible suspects from Amy's past. The case catches the eye of Ellen Abbot (think "Nancy Grace"), a permanently furious former prosecutor and victims' rights advocate, who doesn't like the sound of Amy's vanishing or the looks of Nick's killer smile. Human tragedy becomes cable TV entertainment. Need I tell you that before long Nick hires a celebrity attorney to represent him?

At this point, I hope I don't need to tell you this is a very fun and suspenseful read. Get a friend to read it too, so you can compare your interpretations of the clues with another reader. You'll be thinking about the foreshadowing, the characters, our media-obsessed culture and the book's ending when the final page is gone.

Note: I received a free copy of Gone Girl for purposes of this review.

A Disappearing Act

Playing dead is an involuntary act like fainting

Life is a mysterious thing, but the absence of life can be even more mysterious. Some recent disturbing news stories (a baby in a coffin, a tornado victim in a body bag) involve a declaration of death when the victim wasn't actually dead. This morning, I accidentally stumbled across the opossum who lives under our ground-level deck. She "died" before my eyes. When her body later disappeared, there was no real mystery there. She had come to and scuttled away. But what's the truth behind these disappearances?

Craig Holden: Four Corners of Night (1999). In this dark novel, a missing teenage girl triggers bad memories for a cop, whose own daughter vanished seven years earlier.

Iain Banks: The Crow Road (2008). Prentice McHoan searches for his missing Uncle Rory. According to Banks, it's a book about "Death, Sex, Faith, cars, Scotland, and drink."

Tana French: In the Woods (2007). A multiple award-winning Irish novel begins with the disappearance of several children in the woods.

Hanna Pittard: The Fates Will Find Their Way (2011). Some neighborhood boys obsess over their missing 16-year-old classmate, Nora Lindell.

Ed McBain: So Long as You Both Shall Live (1976). When Detective Bert Kling's bride Augusta disappears on their wedding night, the 87th Precinct launches a search for her.

David Ely: Seconds (1963). Ever hear the saying, "You can't go home again"? Wilson begins a new life, only to realize he misses his old one.

William Irish: Phantom Lady (1942). A woman wearing an orange hat is the only witness who can save a man from the electric chair. Does she even exist?

Helen McCloy: The Impostor (1977). A woman imprisoned in a mental institution insists that her husband has been replaced by a double.

E. Phillips Oppenheim: The Great Impersonation (1920). It is shortly before World War I, and the German Baron Leopold von Ragastein aims to impersonate his English lookalike, Sir Everard Dominey. Oppenheim was the James Patterson of his day.

Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar (1949). A missing heir to the fortune of an English horse-breeding family is impersonated by a young man who closely resembles him. From the author of The Daughter of Time.

Peter Lovesey: The False Inspector Dew (1982). A woman conspires with a dentist to kill his wife, Lydia, by posing as Lydia on board the Mauretania. A man has booked passage under the name of Walter Dew, the famous Scotland Yard inspector who arrested Crippen for his murders, so when Lydia's body is fished out of the water, the Mauretania's captain asks "Inspector Dew" to investigate.

Ethel Lina White: The Wheel Spins (1936). Alfred Hitchcock based his movie The Lady Vanishes on this novel about a rich and spoiled young woman who insists that an elderly passenger has disappeared from the train. Others say there was no such passenger.

Graham Greene: The Third Man (1950). Harry Lime dies in an accident shortly before his friend Rollo Martins arrives in Vienna to visit him. Martins then searches for a missing witness to the accident. Greene wrote the screenplay for the famed film of The Third Man before writing the book. Martins's first name in the movie is Holly, not Rollo. The story is that the name was Rollo Martins in Greene's screenplay, but Joseph Cotten, who played the part, disliked the name Rollo. When Greene wrote the book, he kept the name he'd originally chosen. (Take that, you actor you!)

Margaret Millar: Beyond this Point Are Monsters (1970). Robert Osborne's childhood bedroom door wore a sign reading "Beyond this point are monsters." One evening after dinner, the grown-up Osborne goes outside the mess hall of his ranch to find his dog and doesn't come back.

Colin Dexter: Service of All the Dead (1979). A church warden is killed in the vestry, and Inspector Morse investigates this and other evil in the congregation.

Dan Chaon: Await Your Reply (2009). Miles Cheshire is haunted by the disappearance of his troubled twin brother Hayden, who has been missing for 10 years.

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1939). Private eye extraordinaire Philip Marlow is hired to search for a millionaire's missing son-in-law.

Samuel W. Taylor: The Man with My Face (1948). Chick Graham returns home from the office to find that his wife and dog refuse to recognize him and that his double insists that he is the real Chick Graham.

Edmund Crispin: The Moving Toyshop (1946). A man discovers a corpse in a toyshop and is hit on the head. When he returns with the police, the toyshop is gone.

Herbert Brean: Wilders Walk Away (1948). A New England family has a tradition of disappearing.

Jonathan Latimer: The Lady in the Morgue (1936). Bill Crane and his drinking buddies star in this classic madcap novel about corpse-napping, grave robbing, and the otherwise missing.

John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). In the third George Smiley book, Smiley must identify a mole in the British Secret Service.

Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Herbert Greenleaf wants his son Dickie to come home from Italy, so he asks Tom Ripley to find him. This is a very bad mistake.

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1860). A gothic classic that routinely makes best mysteries lists, it involves a plot to defraud an heiress.

Harlan Coben: Tell No One (2001). David and Elizabeth Beck, a young married couple, return to the site of their first kiss at age 12. Elizabeth is kidnapped and murdered; David is beaten and left for dead. Eight years later, an email message to David could only come from Elizabeth.

The use of disappearance, impersonation, mistaken identity, doubles, and doppelgängers has created some great books of crime fiction. Don't miss them.