Disappearances

Disappearances is simultaneously more impressive and less impressive than I would have expected, for being Howard Frank Mosher's first book. I've read Mosher before, but not since high school, and at the time he was my favorite “Vermont” writer. (Vermont is where I grew up).

It is well-written, I'd say, if you look at each chapter/vignette separately. But once you stack all these vignettes together, they get very tiring. The book sometimes felt like a collection of unrelated stories, entertaining but tedious to read, each adding very little to overall plot or characterization. However, zooming out one more level, the overall arc of the story was magnificent. The last 10 pages alone, which tied together the rest of the story, bumped my rating from a 3 or 3.5 stars to a solid four stars. I just wish there had been slightly fewer tall tales, and slightly more of the meaningful ending material, spread out over a greater length of the story.

The unforgettable thing about this book are all of the wacky characters. They're entertaining, all of them have hilarious, wildly exaggerated misadventures, but they were rarely funny in a way that made me laugh out loud, and sometimes I felt like the unbelievability of the stories kept me from connecting with the characters on a deeper level.

One of the most masterfully presented characters in this story is the villain, Carcajou. Although he appears in only a few scenes, he is a consistent presence throughout the story, the constant worry on the minds of (narrator) Wild Bill and his father. He is literally “unkillable”, returning to terrorize Wild Bill after many wounds that should have been mortal. It took me until the very end of the story to realize that Carcajou was a metaphor. Another reviewer suggested that Carcajou is “conscience”, but I think that he represents the background level of fear/terror/vulnerability that all humans, on some level, share. This fear materializes as one becomes an adult, marking the end of the childhood feeling of immortality. Wild Bill talks a lot about the ‘wonder and terror' of the world; Carcajou, with his scary, animal features is the personification of both. This is all experienced over a three day trip that marks Wild Bill's coming of age and full knowledge of the secrets of his family.

The title, at first mysterious, ends up being the central mystery of the story. Many characters mysteriously disappear, including all of the Bonhomme family, going back to Wild Bill's great great great-grandfather René. Someone smarter than me probably has a better interpretation, but I read this as a very literal reference to both familial pride and the inescapability of family bonds. There was something very haunting and beautiful about the way all the Bonhomme disappearances were described.

Worth mentioning again: I loved the end of this book, for what it made me realize about the whole book. The father-son relationship depicted in these pages is movingly written, the importance of it crystallizing only at the very end. “I could only stand at the window and stare out at Uncle Henry and Rat and the hay with the indefinable oppression of the heart that I would wake with and live with and go to sleep with for the next year”.