Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Song for the Missing



Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing is maybe the saddest book I’ve ever read. I mean that as a compliment.

It’s not easy to write about sad, just like it’s not easy to write funny. But O’Nan is an expert at writing heartbreaking books. I mean that as a compliment, too, though I know saying that most of his books are sad isn’t exactly a great way to recommend him.

The thing is that O’Nan writes books full of sadness that are not depressing. They are sentimental and beautiful, but never contrived. I often hate sentimentality because so often it’s a mask, a way of trying to get a reader/viewer to feel something without earning it. O’Nan’s sentimentality is different. Virtually every character he writes is yearning for something in the past—the narrator of Snow Angels who can’t forget high school, all the players in The Night Country whose lives seem to have stopped on the fateful Halloween night a year previous, etc.

In Songs for the Missing we get something similar—a book about a girl who goes missing that is almost entirely about those left behind and not the missing girl herself, who we only see in the brief opening chapter, and then not again. This is a good trick on one level because it puts us in a position of great empathy with the characters we’re reading about—the parents, the sister, the boyfriend, the best friend. None of them know what happened to the girl—neither do we.

But what really makes the book succeed is what always makes O’Nan’s books successful—the sense that he’s not writing for the reader. A bad sentimentalist writes with a deliberate intent to create some kind of emotion in the reader. O’Nan doesn’t seem to care about his audience at all. His books are often potentially subject to the criticism that nothing happens, that they lack a plot, that they go on too long. And yet, they are compelling. You won’t find yourself unable to put down Songs for the Missing (or, for that matter The Good Wife or Last Night at the Lobster) because you want to know what happens. If you’ve ever read O’Nan you’ll probably have a good idea that not much is going to happen. You won’t be able to put the book down because you’ll want to stay with the characters.

O’Nan is not a complicated writer, nor is he a spectacular writer. This is part of why he’s somehow able to put out a novel every year and have them all be astonishingly good. His writing is simple, a reflection of the people he writes about.

Many writers who write about "everyday people" do so either condescendingly or, alternatively, with the deliberate intent to celebrate their ordinariness. O’Nan doesn’t bother. His books could be non-fiction. He finds characters in interesting but not spectacular circumstances. Most important is that he cares about the characters he creates. He writes with no agenda other than to tell their story. As such, when we’re with the girl’s father in Songs for the Missing we understand him and feel what he feels. When we’re with the girl’s mother we understand why she’s furious with her daughter’s friends, who withheld information that might have helped early on. When we’re with the friends, we understand exactly why they did. Neither party is right or wrong. But they feel true.

What might be most amazing about O’Nan is not his efficiency (seriously, a book every year?), or his empathy, but the range of topics and locales he takes on with such precision. I’ve said previously that his characters tend to be ordinary people, but none can be said to be more alike than that. Years ago he wrote a novel actually called Everyday People about inner-city, mostly black residents of Pittsburgh. This is the kind of book from a white male author that should fail spectacularly, but it’s beautiful (if nowhere near his best). Since then, he’s written about a small-town cop, a wife waiting for her husband to return from prison, the family and friends of a missing girl, the owner of a Red Lobster on the last night before the restaurant closes, and more. Most of the stories take place in New England, but he’s also written about urban Pittsburgh, rural Ohio, and Vietnam.

There is a point, maybe two-thirds of the way through Songs for the Missing, when I started to wonder if the book was going to go on just a bit too long. Almost immediately, the tone changed, events threatened to happen, then did. The brilliance of the book, I think, is not simply that I spent 200 pages reading about nothing much happening—and knowing full well nothing would—but that I almost wondered if the events that form the resolution such as it is were necessary at all.