THE SWANK HOTEL

A young woman whose life consists of a midlevel corporate job and a recently purchased house learns that her sister is missing, not for the first time, but this time perhaps forever.

Single, settled, and introverted, Em has long realized that for her substance-addicted sister, Ad, “there were three places in the world—missing or about to be; in a hospital; and in the house they came from—Em knew exactly what that house was. It was her parents’ brains. You came out of their bodies and into their brains.” In this epigrammatic novel of loss and longing, the reader enters Em’s brain and stays there as she learns once again that Ad is missing, becomes enmeshed in a co-worker’s bizarre extramarital affair, and then has an equally strange liaison of her own. This dazed, alienated stream-of-consciousness is aerated now and then by grim humor and zany insight. On a visit to Las Vegas, for example, Em contemplates “gondolas gliding through chlorine,” and her snapshots of office life are laser-sharp. References to 9/11 and the hunt for Osama bin Laden tether the narrative to a specific time, while Em’s skewed observations create a queasy sense of the world having tilted and of the most mundane details—of eating, sleeping, talking, seeing—having acquired a strange and unsettling formlessness. Moving back and forth between Em’s perspective and those of a handful of other characters, the novel sometimes tests the reader’s patience and, in two passages, their tolerance for graphic details of exploitative pornography and jokes.  “People were the toxic detritus of their own horrid history,” Em concludes, “and also clear water droplets on the tips of the grasses of meadows in advance of fires.” Her sister, most of all.

A fretful, introspective narrative of family dissolution.