LET’S DISAPPEAR

Stuart (Call Him Mac, 2018, etc.) tells the story of a teenage girl at the center of a massive manhunt-turned–metafictional puzzle in this postmodern thriller.

High school junior Vivian Shortfield and her father, Stephan, were forced to move from suburban Baltimore to Cranston, Arizona, less than a year ago when Stephan became a state’s witness in a case involving financial crimes and murder. Now they have to leave again. “We have to get away from here,” Stephan tells Vivian. “We have to disappear and no one can know where we’ve gone.” Vivian just so happens to be writing a novel about disappearing…or rather, she’s writing a novel about a girl also named Vivian who is writing a book about disappearing. The family does just that—shortly after Vivian borrowed a book called How To Create a New Identity from the Cranston Library. Three months later, FBI agents arrive to question the librarian, Perry Ricketts, about her whereabouts. A lover of detective stories, Ricketts sets about trying to solve the case with Norman Nettles, Vivian’s former English teacher—who knew her not as Vivian Shortfield, but as Vivian Nau. As people dig into the lives of Vivian and her family members, they learn that the scope of the crimes in which they are involved or affected by becomes wider and weirder. As the Shortfields/Naus/Manchesters/MacLawns flee across the country attempting to craft new identities, their case becomes a source of increasing intrigue and frustration for her former neighbors, the FBI agents tasked with finding them, and the hit man/lawyer team that is also on their trail. How hard can it be to catch a family of three in an Airstream trailer? It turns out nothing is easy when the facts are constantly changing. Stuart’s conundrum of a novel is told in deceptively simple prose, though the dialogue is far from naturalistic: “Disappear? That’s exactly right Daddy. I told you about my book. I’m going to disappear into the air like the air itself. Do you know why you can’t see air? No, well, let me tell you why.” This helps to create an atmosphere in which nothing seems completely realistic and therefore anything is possible, and Stuart certainly manages to keep readers guessing. A downside of the author’s method, however, is that the characters feel less like real people than puppets in a stage show (or, perhaps by design, characters in a character’s novel). This makes it difficult to invest much emotion in their ultimate fate, which lessens the stakes quite a bit. Like some of Calvino’s or Pynchon’s novels, the resolution is less the point than the ever evolving premise, and the book will strike many as self-indulgent long before they get to the innermost Russian doll. Even so, Stuart has created a distinctive, unusual thriller that will likely rub a certain sort of reader in the exact right way.

An idiosyncratic mystery for the postmodern set.