Endpapers taken from 1970s knit fabric in private collection
When I read Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski a year ago, I felt as if my heart had been ripped out in the heightened emotion of the closing pages; with Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon, the emotional intensity was present from the opening page and sustained throughout; my heart when not in my mouth leapt, contracted and plummeted for the duration of the novel.
From the arresting first pages (which can be read almost in entirety on the Persephone webpage) we know that this is a novel about loss, the unbearable loss of losing a child.
Alex Selky, going on seven, so eager to grow up, kissed his mother goodbye on their front steps on the hot bright morning of May 15 1980, and marched himself down the street on his way to the New Boston School of Back Bay, two blocks from his corner. He never arrived at school, and from the moment he turned the corner, he apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.
We are shown and given insight into the impact of Alex’s disappearance on those who loved him, especially his mother, and Al Menetti, the detective assigned to his case. Still Missing is raw and emotive but never sentimentalises; it provides an inside -albeit fictitious- look at the trauma of a missing child; of the public and media attention; of the overwhelming support and judgment of strangers; of the unrelenting hunt for clues and scanning of children’s faces on the street and in the park; of unrelinquished hope. Susan Selky, mother to Alex, Harvard English professor, recently separated from her husband, refuses to give up hope that Alex will be found; it is Susan’s faith and tenacity that carries -or rather propels- the reader through the novel ‘s thrilling pages. Structured loosely as a thriller complete with a leading detective who first comes off as a Columbo-type, Still Missing has exceptional emotional depth and vivid characterisation.
Gutcheon explores the dramatic behind-the-scenes investigations in a missing child case where nobody is above suspicion and every secret is unearthed and revealed; in the public eye and being under investigation by the police, everyone’s motives and actions are held up to scrutiny and nothing is private, even grief. What Gutcheon does remarkably well is tackle the stereotypes and the judgments that come with a high-profile missing child case; everyone has an opinion and Still Missing does not shy away from showing how the public often react to what they deem to be the parents’ irresponsibility in losing their child or how the parents conduct themselves in the aftermath, which prompts the reader to examine their own prejudices. The stereotypes are infuriating but fitting for the 1980 setting and Gutcheon never endorses them but presents them in the historical framework of the early years of the Gay Rights movement.
Susan Selky is a compelling character; Gutcheon has drawn a vivid portrait of a grieving mother whose pain is palpable. Each of Gutcheon’s characters are very well realised with their flaws on display and private conversations -outwith Susan’s presence- and indiscretions revealed but Susan is particularly memorable. The disappearance of Alex seems very real and the conversations that take place and reactions of Susan -and her husband, Graham- convincing and also illuminating.
Much has been made of the seeming modernity of this in relation to other Persephone Books but it has an almost timeless quality and universal appeal. The Persephone titles I respond to strongly are those that focus on relationships and raw emotions; the highly emotive Still Missing easily joins Laski and Whipple and could be said to be quintessentially Persephone. Preceding its reissue earlier this year I had discussed the book with Lydia at the Lamb’s Conduit Street shop who told me that Nicola Beauman had been wanting to publish it for years, since it inexplicably fell out-of-print in the UK, but that high-profile child abductions had made it inappropriate to reissue earlier.
Still Missing is a powerfully moving novel about the disappearance of a child and the months following (hence the “still”). As the investigation loses momentum Susan sits at her window every morning facing the corner where she last saw Alex and this scene touchingly shifts through seasons.
As the days grew shorter and the chill in the autumn air deepened, the long uneven panes of glass in the living-room were grey with thin frost when Susan went with her coffee cup in the early mornings to sit looking down at the street. From the lush gold and blue, deep as an overturned bowl, of the last morning on earth that she saw her son, the light had changed to the flat grey brightness of impending winter.
The quiet poignancy of the above scene and the pain of Susan is a good example of the tone of the novel; the weather has changed but Susan’s undying hope that Alex is still alive and will reappear has not.
Other favourite passages:
Uh-huh, thought Menetti. Now it starts. It can’t happen to me. It happened to her, she lost her kid, but if there’s something funny about her, then there’s a reason it could happen to her but it couldn’t happen to me. Now starts the drawing away, the pulling aside, the setting the Selkys apart.
To have her house and her heart and her life held open, exposed to the public at this moment, to be robbed of the personal and private in tragedy, was particularly bitter.
Something beneath her ribcage leaped and tore. These slams of pain were so physically felt, she wondered if it were possible to go on taking them without the inner fibres beginning to actually shiver apart, like the creak and scream of a wooden boat breaking up in a storm.
*The very observant of you will notice that this is a re-posting of a review I wrote last year. It bears repeating and is definitely worth highlighting during Persephone Reading Weekend.
