In 2006, there was a film in Malayalam which became a cult film of sorts. It was called Thanmathra ("Molecule"), and depicted a man's frightening descent into Alzheimer's. But what gave the story its poignancy was the bond between the protagonist and his son: the single-minded effort on the part of the former to make the latter an officer of the Indian Administrative Service. Incidentally, the movie also focussed on the relationship between the protagonist and his father.Speaking on the movie, the director said that he chose the name of the film to represent Indian society. Even if each family was nuclear (an atom, in fact), it was joined to a multitude of other families - each son was a father, each mother a daughter, each son a father in his turn... and so on and so forth. In India, the joint family never died, but formed a loosely structured molecule.This metaphor stuck in my mind, and I was immediately reminded of it the moment I read the stories in this collection. Because Dan Chaon is writing about a molecule that is fast coming unstuck.-------------------------------------------If I were asked to pick a theme running through all the stories in this collection, I would say 'family'. Here are fathers, sons, mothers, daughters and siblings, all loving and hating, bonding and drifting apart. I am not familiar with American society, but from the laments I have heard from friends and relatives settled abroad about 'deteriorating' relationships, I conclude that the strong familial fidelity that is the norm in India is conspicuous by its absence. This in itself is not a bad thing: it gives a lot of freedom to individuals, and does prevent parental notions of control which can become claustrophobic. But it does remove the safety net below the tenuous thing we call 'security'.This is illustrated in the story Falling Backwards. This tale, told from back to front, traces the life of an alienated woman at her current lonely stage in life to her childhood moments of companionship with her father. It ends with the telling metaphor of her father and herself falling backwards willingly from a construction scaffolding, knowing that the net will catch them.Chaon flirts with horror (he confesses himself a horror fan), but there is nothing supernatural in these stories. What we see are glimpses of the darkness just below the surface. In a way, it is more frightening than ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night: because it is the darkness of the mind that is made visible. In I Demand to Know Where You Are Taking Me, one of the darkest stories in the collection, a macaw becomes the mouthpiece of a convicted rapist for his sister-in-law, who has a love-hate relationship with him. In Here's a Little Something to Remember Me By, a shameful childhood secret keeps on haunting a man, who is not allowed to grow up because his silence might have cost his friend his life. In both these stories, the conclusion is left tantalisingly uncertain.The fluidity of time (as explored in Falling Backwards) as well as the fiendish face behind the smiling visage are hinted at in Big Me, which could be a frightening tale of a psychotic murderer or an innocent child's fantasy, depending on how we look at it.In the title story Among the Missing, there is a telling image of a family which apparently committed suicide en masse by driving into a lake. This story serves as a template, I feel, for all things Dan Chaon is trying to articulate.Looking at their photograph, you couldn’t help imagining them all in that car, under the water. I saw it as a scene in a Bergman film—a kind of dreamy blur around the edges, the water a certain undersea color, like a reflection through green glass. Their bodies would be lifted a bit, floating a few centimeters above the upholstery, bobbing a little with the currents but held fast by the seat belts. Silver minnows would flit past the pale hands that still gripped the steering wheel, and hide in the seaweed of the little girl’s long, drifting hair; a plastic ball might be floating near the ceiling. Their eyes would be wide, and their mouths slightly open; their skin would be pale and shimmery as the inside of a clamshell; but there would be no real expression on their faces. They would just stare, perhaps with faint surprise.This image stayed with me, long after I closed the book.-------------------------------------------The short story is an entirely different proposition from the novel, even though both are forms of narrative. The novel is usually a relatively long and leisurely read, and the reader has a long affair with it: there is time for character development, philosophical discourses, interior monologue... whereas the short story wins purely on how effective it is in conveying its theme with the most economy of words. If the novel is a marriage, the short story is a whirlwind affair conducted over a weekend.The best short stories are those that hit you with the force of a sledge hammer - which the stories in this collection do.Well worth reading, if darkness does not bother you. If more sunny literature is your cup of tea, better leave it alone.
This is the 39th book that I have read for the 100 Book Challenge this year, and also the best.The blurbs on the back cover alluded to the stories being a bit dark, somewhat edgy, made mention of the way they dwell on the alienation of the current American experience. They sounded, in short, like kind of a downer. It is hard, then, to explain how much pleasure I felt in reading them. I think that Chaon's real strength as a writer is that he connects with something deeply human in his work. Many of these stories are about the shape of absence, which is a theme that is woven throughout the book. But it is also about the bonds that form between distinctly seperate human beings. It is about the sameness of brothers, the genial estrangements that exist between husbands and wives and parents and children, the way wagon wheel tracks in the Nebraska dirt can represent two people holding hands over divergent paths. It is also about the active interior lives of characters who appear to be not doing much. An argument could be made that as much action in these stories takes place inside the characters heads as it does without, but you never feel that as a drawback. The book opens with a quote from Raymond Carver, "Whatever this was all about, it was not a vain attempt - journey." And that encapsulates the spirit of this collection - that it is not any particular destination that matters, it is the journey of these characters over the course of their lives, and our ability to walk with them for the moments captured in these pages which makes the work extraordinary.The characters are so well crafted and believable, you never doubt that they have existed before you encounter them, and that they go on after their particular story is concluded. They never feel cliched, or clunky, or too much the same. Under different circumstances, I might feel underwhelmed by Chaon's tendency to leave big questions unanswered, but the mystery of many of these stories is a large part of their charm. He is a master of the art of leaving the reader wanting more, to know more, to feel more, to have things wrap up in a tidy way in the final paragraph. But he resists this impulse every time. It is like watching one of the great early season episodes of the X-Files, where some questions are answered, but the answers seem to invoke a larger sense of the unknown. His narrators are also wonderfully unreliable. They lie to other characters. They lie to themselves. You get the distinct feeling that they could be misleading you, the omnipotent reader. Two of my favorite stories in the book were "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," and "Big Me." In "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," the narrator is forced to take care of a bird belonging to her brother-in-law, who has recently been sent to prison for a series of rapes. The bird is a macaw, a talking parrot, who mimics the words and phrases of a deeply disturbed man. One theme in this story is the extensive fraternal similarity between her husband and his brother. There are times that the reader wonders who exactly the bird is parroting. The bird itself is a terrific counterpoint to the silence that exists between the central couple as the crimes of the brother-in-law begin to take up more and more space in their lives. This story is also a good example of the unanswered question: Was the brother in law guilty? It seems likely, but you don't know for sure. "Big Me" is a story that is, at first glance, mainly about the power of a child's imagination. It is a recounting, from an adult perspective, the elaborate detective fantasies of his youth. He details the imaginary city his detective alter ego worked in, the darker layer of crime and rascality lurking below the surface of his physical world. It is only as the story develops that you begin to see how this facade of comic book sleuthing has emerged as a escapist coping mechanism that the narrator developed in response to his parents' alcoholism. This is also one of the most thought provoking stories, because the narrator - as an adult - suffers from black outs. Is it because he has a drinking problem as well? Or is there, as is vaguely hinted, a more sinister explanation?My other favorite story was "Passengers, Remain Calm." This was a more upbeat story about the relationship between a young man and his nephew, about the mundane disasters that strike every day, and the ability to weather them as gracefully and humanely as possible.Like with any collection, some stories do read as weaker links overall. I was not deeply impressed with Prodigal, Falling Backwards, or the Eillustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom. But the stories that I did like, I feel as though I will be thinking about a long time. They are good enough to change your mental landscape a little, which is an impressive accomplishment to render in the confines of such limited spaces.
What do You think about Among The Missing (2002)?
Dan Chaon is a master of the Midwestern psyche, the buttoned-down and the balled-up characters, the souls who find limits to their behavior and happiness and possibilities at every turn. A punk rocker confronts the sad fact that he will abandon his own father just as the man's last two wives did. A transplanted wife finds herself at war with a bird who shows her exactly how far she has drifted from her husband, or how unlike they were all along. Roiling under the surfaces of these characters and conflicts is always an uncertain connection to anger, insecurity, violence, lust. The missing, it seems, are those who cannot control their relationship to these dark forces through sheer will or repression.Chaon is another in the long line of writers describing a Midwestern grotesque. His stories and characters are all rooted in flyover country, and they all seem to live the bleak, brown, flat lives of those landscapes. Whenever the characters escape their Midwestern roots, the stories typically bring them back or feature them struggling to preserve their values in a new place. And as with other writers of the Midwestern grotesque, the polite manners of Chaon's characters always mask deeply self-absorbed personalities, on par with the characters of George Saunders--except Chaon's characters speak with more ordinary voices and live less cartoonish lives than Saunders'. They do not struggle against oppressive or exploitative bosses and institutions; rather, they collide repeatedly against the limitations they have learned to place on themselves. Whenever the characters surrounding Chaon's people meet trouble and pain, Chaon's point-of-view characters try inexpertly and half-heartedly to comfort the bereaved, always failing.This brings me to why I gave the book four stars instead of five. My complaint isn't the book's somewhat dim outlook on the possibility of human compassion and connection. Those things are rare enough, and it would be a mistake to write only about worlds where they reliably appear. My complaint is that the critique of human self-absorption and repression which emerges in Chaon's stories begins to feel one-noted. For as many people who never escape the boundaries they themselves may have erected, there are people who break down those barriers, in little or big ways. Refusing to feature Midwesterners who seem capable of such transcendence feels a little reductive, making me a little defensive on behalf of my fellow Midwesterners. Chaon's book seems to rely excessively on the ages-old stereotype that Midwesterners lack intellectual curiosity or courage, lack the ability to challenge the culture than encircles and stifles them. More often, Chaon's characters simply leave.Which is fine, and true--I left the Midwest myself. Plenty of people do. And what Chaon gives us is an insightful collection of characters who, whether they stayed or left, have never managed to escape the worst parts of that region or of themselves. Poignant, heartfelt, painful, and above all honest, this collection is worth reading. However, I'm still waiting for the lighter collection that balances books like this one--a collection featuring Midwestern characters who struggle against the limitations by living truthful, intellectually curious lives of periodically brash but also, yes, quiet desperation.
—Paul Cockeram
So clearly the question is, if I don't like short stories why do I keep reading collections of short stories. Let me explain as quickly as I can. I heard of Dan Chaon's "great" book Among the Missing and so I reserved it from my library without realizing it was a book of short stories. At the same time, Await Your Reply (a novel) was available (furthering my expectation that Chaon was a novelist). I read Await Your Reply and it wasn't great, but it was okay (and it wasn't what had been recommended after all, so I wasn't so bitter) and then later (before Among the Missing had come in) I found Fitting Ends and checked it out (again without realizing it was a book of short stories until I started reading it). While I was reading Fitting Ends, Among the Missing finally came in on reserve. I was not a huge fan of Fitting Ends (for a few reasons, read that review if you want info), but again it was not the one that was recommended and now I had Among the Missing in hand and so...I read it. In Among the Missing, Chaon again deals with the complexities of family relationships, addiction, loneliness, and (obviously) loss. The loneliness theme (especially paired with the white trash, intelligent reader) I found particularly compelling for my own personal reasons. In Big Me, the very astute 8 year thinks : "If no one knows you, then you are no one." and Colleen in Looking Backward "she wonders if she will ever not be lonely. Perhaps, she thinks, being lonely is a part of her, like the color of her eyes and skin, something in her genes." All of the characters in these stories have secrets or social awkwardness (usually because they are intelligent, but not good at relating to people) and so wallow in their own lonliness to some extent. Those that seem to be the most "normal" or "well adjusted" turn out to still be harboring something (such as Tom in Something to Remember Me By After I'm Gone).I also enjoyed his take on parenthood. My mother-in-law once said that parenthood is 9 parts boredom coupled with 1 part complete terror. Chaon deals with parenting well in Prodigal: "It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail." and "I could actually feel the goodness moving out of me, the way you can feel blood moving when you blush or grow pale. 'Come on, guys' I said, 'let's not fight. This is fun, isn't it? Let's have fun.' But my gentle voice was just an imitation," to describe the moment when instead of enjoying his children's company he is moved to parent-mediator. Lots of the other stories talk about the relationship between parent and adult child and the loss that arises when they don't really know each other (bringing up the slightly trite question of can we ever know anyone?), but Prodigal was the only one that dealt with parent and young child relationship. For a collection of short stories it held together remarkably well. I won't repeat my complaint about short stories (see review of Fitting Ends if you want it), but besides that it was a good book. All of the stories featured some missing person...some were dead, some were actually missing, and some were just ideas of people who never were (but that of course made them missing). These characters were still similar (both to each other and occasionally to some of the characters from Fitting Ends and Await Your Reply...lots of lawyers, a few realtors, readers, drunks, and general white trash sprinkled throughout), but at least they weren't in the same small town (although we still get a lot of rural NE...write what you know Danny boy) and they were more complex and compelling that those found in Fitting Ends. Overall, I think each of the stories managed to say something unique, but similar to the others.
—Sheri
A blurb on the front cover by Lorrie Moore says these stories are funny, but I don't find them so at all. They were too melancholy and disturbing for me. (And if you know my penchant for melancholy, disturbing stories, you know that's saying something.) In an author interview at the back of the book Dan Chaon uses as an example of humor a scene where a child doesn't understand what's going on at a wake and spends the entire time pretending that the yolk of a hard-boiled egg is his eye, while everyone is sobbing around him. But that's not funny, that's just incongruous. That's a different thing entirely.Also, the stories were quite repetitive, returning to the same characters, settings, and details over and over again to the point where I thought Chaon was doing something clever and revisiting his other stories through the eyes of different characters. I actually flipped back through to check the characters' names, and they were different, so that wasn't the case. I understand that people often return to the same themes (especially if they're autobiographical), but I wouldn't choose to put them in the same collection.
—Brenda Pike
