Novels of the Missing — Jessica Chiarella’s The Lost Girls and Rebecca Copeland’s The Kimono Tattoo

New Mexico, thirty years ago. My kids and I have just finished dinner at our favorite Chinese place, located along Albuquerque’s busy Route 66. I’m at the register, settling the bill, when I look around to check on my son and daughter, something I’ve probably done more than once in the last minute or two. My son, aged eight, is there, daydreaming about something or other, mostly likely a dogfight involving supersonic fighter jets. He’s where he’s supposed to be.

My three-year-old? Absent. Missing. Vanished. Kapoof. Quite likely taken, I immediately fear. I tell my son to wait with the cashier then run back into the restaurant. It’s a big place, with several cavernous dining rooms. First, I check the table we’ve just vacated but find no sign of her. I dash into each of the dining rooms in turn, charging deep into them. “Jean? Jean!” I call at the top of my lungs, hoping she’s somewhere among the tables, too short to be seen. All diners pause to stare, chopsticks frozen en route to their lips.

Probably every parent has experienced this terror at some point — you’re in a crowded market, a festival, a concert or rally or gathering of the tribes. You’re a decent parent, at least you try to be, and you would trade whatever breath you’ve got coming to tack one extra breath onto the life of your kid. So you check on her reflexively, knowing, as you do, the dangers of crowds. And, each time, she’s in easy reach. Until she isn’t. Physiologically, the response is instantaneous — your heart hammers, sweat sprouts from your palms, your breathing races and turns shallow. On the emotional end, that black, indeterminate thing boiling in the center of your chest can only be called dread. It’s there all the time, just waiting to be activated. When you find her (and almost always, you will), the effects persist: exhausted, you feel, with a tiredness that goes to the marrow, and nauseous, your belly charred by adrenalin and bile.

In my case, I grabbed my son’s hand and dashed into the parking lot, hoping to blockade any escaping kidnap-mobile with my own dad body if necessary, yet crushed already by the certainty that whoever abducted her would be long-gone, my delay in searching the restaurant a fatal mistake. Then I see her, standing tiny and alone by the rear bumper of my sedan, happy and proud to have negotiated this transit alone. She’s three-feet tall, the parking lot is dark, a driver backing out a pickup or SUV would never have seen her. I reach her, she beams at me, and I do something I’ve not done before and will not do again. I turn her around, lean down, and swat her bottom with considerable intent. Her face crumples, not so much from pain, I suspect, but from sheer surprise. I am not a hitting old man.

But I want her to remember this moment, I want this lesson to stick. Or maybe I’m just so adrenaline-poisoned that I can’t think straight. Maybe I’m simply out of control.

The particular terror associated with the loss — as opposed to the death — of a loved one has dominated the news-cycle of late, with the nation transfixed by the disappearance of van-life influencer Gabby Petito. We, as a species, seem addicted to narratives, real or otherwise, of loved ones who’ve slipped, or been sucked, into the ether. It’s a trope of story-telling from crime fiction (Lisa Jewell’s excellent Then She Was Gone and Tana French’s In the Woods) to the literary (for example, Frederick Busch’s Girls). Indeed, a search of Goodreads turns up 2049 titles for “novels about missing persons” while the search string “fiction about death” returns about one tenth of that number. As readers, as humans, we seem more compelled by people’s disappearance than we are by their actual extinction.

Why should this be so? Rationally, one might expect the reverse to be true — disappearance offers some hope, however slim, that one’s loved one may some day reappear. Whereas death is so non-negotiably final, the afterlife so profoundly open to question.

The inexplicable vanishment of those we cherish allows, indeed demands, our imaginations to run wild. We envision unspeakable sexual assault, starvation and squalid captivity, our loved ones chained in dark, airless rooms, caked with their own feces, rash-bedeviled by their own urine. We are tortured for them. Better, surely, to know, irrespective of the anguish the knowledge might bring. An overdose, a suicide, murder in whatever form — at least, we’d be assured they’re not being slowly dismembered or consumed morsel by agonizing morsel by some neighborhood cannibal. Stephen King argues that the monster’s unveiling will always be to some degree a disappointment…and a relief. In Danse Macabre, he tells us, "Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. 'A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible', the audience thinks, 'but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall’.”

The annihilation of a loved one is the ten-foot bug. Their disappearance? The ambiguous horror of the closed door.

But why are we drawn to that closed door?

Recent efforts in the area of biocultural literary analysis suggest that the human penchant for story — for narrative — is hardwired into our very gray matter: no mere happenstance, but an adaptation that conduced to our success as a species (Boyd, 2010). One such adaptive function may be reflected in the stories we spontaneously construct and tell ourselves — namely, our daydreams (for a fuller discussion, see Gottschall, 2013). Commonly, in those diurnal musings, we counterpose to ourselves some obstacle — the boorish interlocutor, the unjust accuser, the inapproachability of the beautiful other — and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we overcome! The boor is chastened, the lovely one wooed, the accuser him- or herself condemned! Walter Mitty envisions his heroic existence in each of us.

But daydreams of this type may serve something more than a slightly embarrassing itch for self-aggrandizement. They may, in fact, function as practice, preparation for the challenges our social order presents us. We will, if we’re lucky to live long enough, encounter numerous rude vulgarians, weather multiple unjust indictments, become infatuated with someone who seems out of reach. Our conflict-ridden daydreams school us for these moments so that we come to them not as babes but with a quotient of experience, speculative though that experience might be.

The narratives we construct for those we love have a different flavor. To such degree as my daydreams feature my son or daughters, the lives they posit are success-filled, disease- and disappointment-free, sun-drenched, well-loved, and with no ominous cloud furring the horizon. I doubt I’m alone in this. It’s one thing for me to imagine myself beating the odds. For my loved ones I desire the odds be stacked in their favor; for them, my dreams are dreams of lives fulfilled — healthy, happy, and rich in meaning.

Yet what am I — what are we — to do with the small, yet non-zero chance of their vanishment? It does happen. How can we mentally rehearse the disappearance of those we adore, prepare ourselves for the categorically unacceptable? This must to some degree underlie our fascination with stories (fictional or otherwise) of loved ones gone missing. Stories of lost loved one allow us to practice such loss at a safer distance, to experience this particular horror at a level several times removed. ⁠(1)

In the plight of Gabby Petito, the onlooker finds opportunity for such practice. For those who are normally made, simple human empathy — also an artifact of our evolutionary development — sounds within us an echo, however attenuated, of the misery the Petitos must certainly feel, gifting us a scintilla of familiarity that might conceivably help us navigate this particular region of Hell, should we find ourselves consigned there.

Fiction does this one better. In the case of the Petitos, Gabby and those who loved her, we have only empathy to guide us. We can imagine their pain, yet we lack access to the gooey viscera, that interior space where the searing heartache abides. In Then She Was Gone’s Ellie and Laurel Mack, for example, we’re granted access to these interior spaces — we witness Ellie’s rage, worry, and terror, her slow diminishment and final acceptance; we participate with Laurel in the circumscribed, chronically wounded existence of a parent whose child has gone missing.

(It’s also likely, the psychology of loss notwithstanding, that tales of vanished loved ones simply lend themselves more readily to the novel- or scriptwriter’s pen. For the missing, their narrative importantly continues. For the known deceased, their final breath constitutes a period to their narrative’s last sentence. Those who mourn them continue in another narrative altogether.)

The pain of siblings gone missing — survivors’ pain — undergirds both novels I review in today’s post.

The Lost Girls by Jessica Chiarella

Protagonist and part-time Goth bartender Marti Reese’s days are haunted throughout by her sister’s 1998 disappearance. When a Jane Doe turns up on the coroner’s bench twenty years later, the deceased bears similarities to the missing girl and Marti is called in to assist with identification. Though the remains are not her sister’s, the event provides the nucleus of what becomes an award-winning podcast, conferring upon Marti a mild celebrity. A possible tie between a late-nineties murder in Marti’s childhood neighborhood and sister Maggie’s disappearance draws Marti and producer Andrea into an extra-legal investigation and provides grist for their podcast’s season two. Their efforts snare Marti in a sinuous scheme that ultimately puts her life in danger.

The pizazz of Chiarella’s writing, the superimposed pluck and instinct for self-destruction that characterize her heroine, put one in mind of Ellen Meister’s amateur sleuth and constitutional wild child, Dana Barry (see posts for The Rooftop Party and Love Sold Separately). But Chiarella serves up Marti Reese minus Meister’s subversive humor. What does come though in The Lost Girls and what I most admire about the book is its pervasive sense of anger. This, I think, is the sensibility most apropos, indeed essential, to a novel of female vanishment in this world where violence against women is routine and in many cases institutional. More, as a cis, hetero male, Chiarella makes me appreciate in a way I have not before the disquieting ambiguity of women’s attraction to male partners. (Petito’s autopsy results, not available at the start of this writing, make this point quite brutally as well.) Men — we are attractive, we are desired, and we are sometimes extremely dangerous.

The Kimono Tattoo by Rebecca Copeland

Child disappearance furnishes the emotional underpinnings to Rebecca Copeland’s debut outing, The Kimono Tattoo. Copeland’s heroine, Ruth Bennett, plies her trade as a translator in Kyoto, the Japanese city where she was raised by missionary parents and where her younger brother Matthew disappeared decades earlier under mysterious circumstances. When she receives an offer to translate a new novel by a revered Japanese author, long presumed dead, she cannot resist.

In short order, the events of the manuscript and a pair of real-life murders disturbingly conflate. Ruth finds herself caught in a dark design involving traditional kimono-making, Japanese tattoo, dog fighting, human trafficking, and even, perhaps, her missing brother. At the center of all of this is an ancient scrap of fabric with a troubled history and complex provenance. As Ruth struggles to unravel the threads that ensnare her — and, possibly, find her sibling — she’s aided by her boss and her boss’ (handsome, of course) son, a pair of plucky Japanese tattoo punks, a renowned fabric dyer, a traditional dance instructor, and more. One gets the sense either that the Japanese are the world’s most accommodating people or that Ruth possesses some special ability to entice people to put themselves at risk. They are an entertaining bunch, however!

One detects in The Kimono Tattoo — with its cadre of amateur sleuths, its circumspect violence, and its evocation of a mostly kind universe a hefty hint of the spirit that animates the cozy mystery. With respect to this pair of novels, it is the gentler of the two.

To my particular sensibility, The Lost Girls and The Kimono Tattoo suffer from the unreality of The Big Revealment in which dark and baroque schemes are shown to drive each novel’s events. To my eye, the crime story is better served by acute characterization than it is by complex plotting. But, hey, that’s just me. In neither book is this an actual deficit. For one must keep top of mind the first of Updike’s rules for successful reviewing — don’t fault the author for not achieving an effect she didn’t intend. And, truth told, most readers delight in the uncovering of a hidden design. They’ll be entertained by this duo of crime novels in a way they’d not be by, say, Busch’s Girls.

Each of these books is competently written, each in a breezy, quick-moving style, but does either serve the purpose that biocultural literary analysis might posit for it? Does either prepare us or provide emotional training for loss that outrages our sense of the universe — the arbitrary, lacerating subtraction of a loved one from one’s existence? I would argue yes, as much as any tale can do. Chiarella’s and Copeland’s heroines are scoured by their respective losses in the way any of us would be scoured, as I’d have been scoured had I not found my three-year-old on that terrifying New Mexico eve. They are harmed, as any of us would be harmed, in a way that will scab but never seal. Yet each mucks through in her own more-or-less damaged way, as any of us would muck through. Each proves willing to open herself to fresh pain on the slim prospect that her missing loved one might be redeemed.

But on the ultimate question of healing, a question more acutely interrogated in Chiarella’s The Lost Girls, would any of us — should any of us — desire to heal? I would argue not. The pain of a loved one’s disappearance, of the uncertainty of their fate, is the indelible mark their vanishment leaves on the life of anyone unfortunate enough to experience it. We might accommodate such pain but we will never be well. And that is as it ought to be. Such pain should be embraced and held onto —  it is the claim that one gone missing holds on us. It is something we owe.

Buy The Kimono Killer and The Lost Girls at your local bookshop (preferred) or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its profit to benefit local booksellers. Seriously, do any of need to finance Jeff Bezos’ space-cowboy fantasies?

(1) For this notion, thanks to my most insightful interlocutor, the smokin’ hot theologian Myriam Renaud.

Works cited:

Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories (Boston, Harvard University Press, 2010).

Busch, Frederick, Girls (New York, Harvard University Press, 2006).

French, Tana, In the Woods (New York, Penguin Books, 2007).

Gotschall, Jonathan, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York, First Mariner Books, 2013).

Jewell, Lisa, Then She Was Gone (New York, Atria Paperback, 2018).

King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (Pocket Books; Reprint Edition, 2011).