The best books using disappearance in innovative ways

In 1990 Hisham Matar’s father, Jaballah Matar, was abducted, imprisoned, and at some point most likely murdered by the Ghaddafi regime. This traumatic experience has shaped Matar’s four published works to date, though in varied ways that allow us to see, in different modes, the redemptive power of imagination.

In his memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between, Matar examines the geopolitical realities of disappearance, but also its familial, private, and symbolic dimensions – masterfully weaving history, journalism, scholarship, family narrative, and lyric evocation of the clear, beautiful, and sometimes-brutal Mediterranean land- and seascape.

Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat’s linked short-story collections brilliantly balance a focus on detail, gesture, and situation with a cumulative vision of place and fateful circumstance.

In Claire of the Sea Light, the disappearance of a young girl frames a sequence of tales about several members of the small seaside community where the girl lives with her father.

After Claire’s sudden disappearance in the opening narrative, we follow the adults’ betrayals, sacrifices, and missteps to the final story, when the missing girl’s own perceptions provide a moral and imaginative frame for the family and community she must now choose to rejoin or escape permanently.

Aimee Baker’s Doe is a diptych: poems in the first section focus on missing women, while those in the second section reimagine the lives of unidentified women.

Baker creates recurrent, multiple patterns of imagery that celebrate the beauty and dignity of each woman – in argument, essentially, with the ways true crime sometimes exploits and objectifies victims’ lives. At the same time, Doe is about North America as a captivating space of the imagination: the poet creates a geography by turns intimate and vast, familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible.

The finely-crafted textures of the poems in Doe, as well as the apparent dedication to investigation and research in the work overall, make for a rare combination.

Kalisha Buckhanon’s Speaking of Summer develops a major trope of recent disappearance-fiction by women: a search, sometimes a quest, involving two women who are close friends, lovers, or sisters.

But Buckhanon’s novel also experiments with an unreliable narrator, timely social critique, and some Dostoevskian madness. It’s also a novel of Manhattan: as in so many other disappearance-writings, geography (urban geography in this case) is a key element in the narrative as well as in the symbolic and thematic weave of the work.

By the end, the cumulative aspects of the protagonist’s life – her work, her art, her loves, her friendships, her sense of self – compose a memorable celebration of life.

Each of Andrew Porter’s two story collections and one novel develop missing persons as a theme. His latest collection, The Disappeared, also continues the author’s tendency to use place in ways that both locate and isolate his characters.

We find ourselves mainly in San Antonio, and sometimes Austin, Texas in The Disappeared, but the protagonists are also linked by a recurrent sense of hesitancy, missed opportunity, and fecklessness. Each story is about being middle-aged, but by the end, Porter has masterfully balanced his depictions of urban-male domesticity with a deeper, more existential sense of being human.

It is Porter’s evocation of missingness – sometimes foregrounded, sometimes slight – that creates the beautifully elegiac sensibility the reader is left with in finishing The Disappeared.