Still Missing

Author(s): Beth Gutcheon

Location(s): Boston

Genre(s): Fiction

Location

Content

The New York Times’s reviewer wrote: ‘Love is hard enough to write about, but a parent’s love for a child is almost inexpressible in its universality and in the uneventfulness of its nature under ordinary circumstances. When Alex disappears, Susan, his mother, doesn’t just lose a little boy. She loses the most essential part of herself, a piece of her own person-hood; without Alex she has no purpose and no future. Perhaps this can only be understood through a child’s absence – an unnatural cessation like a stopped heart. Given the novel’s painful beginning I wondered how Miss Gutcheon could keep up such an intense emotional pitch. But keep it up she does, and, most impressively, without ever letting Susan slip from our sympathies by believing too much or too little in the likelihood of Alex’s reappearance. She keeps believing, without caring what anybody else thinks, simply because nothing else is possible to her. ‘Susan is strong and warm, the mother we all wish we had or could be. Her friends, relatives and ex-husband, Graham, Alex’s father, show their true natures – some not so pleasant – as grief isolates and distorts her. Susan, obsessed, listens to every psychic, subjects her friends to lie-detector tests and embraces the media ­television crews camp outside her Boston house – with the clear tunnel vision of the mad: never mind that she is being exploited, because somewhere some reader or viewer might help her find her son. ‘Desperate to find him, his mother begins a vigil that lasts for days, then weeks, then months. She is treated first as a tragic figure, then as a grief-crazed hysteric, then as an unpleasant reminder of the bad fortune that can befall us all. Against all hope, despite false leads and the desertions of her friends and allies, she believes with all her heart that somehow, somewhere, Alex will be found alive.’

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