NOTES ON DISAPPEARANCE

by
EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

_________________

Emily St. John Mandel is a regular contributor at The Millions where "Notes on Disappearance" originally appeared. Her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, was published by Unbridled Books and was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 2009 Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Singer's Gun, was published by the same press in 2010. She lives in Brooklyn and has a website at www.emilymandel.com.

Let's get lost in a romantic mist.
Let's get crossed off everybody's list.
Frank Loesser

1.
My mother has me on a Canadian literature program. Twice a year, birthdays and Christmases, a package arrives from British Columbia with one or two Canadian books in it. I have strong opinions about selecting books for nationalism, but these gifts are wonderful, among the highlights of the year. She sends me novels and poetry that I might not have come across in an American bookstore: Shani Mootoo’s spectacular He Drown She in the Sea, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies, Patrick Lane’s poetry. The most recent package included Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis. I’ve been reading it in the subway to and from work all week. It’s very good.

The title seemed familiar when I first saw it, and then I remembered Vanishing: A Memoir by Candida Lawrence, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out last year. Which made me think of something I’ve noticed lately: with no disrespect intended to either Willis or Lawrence, an awful lot of books have vanishing in the title. A cursory search on Amazon reveals about a dozen novels and books of poetry called either Disappearing Act or Disappearing Acts, and at least twice that many titled Vanishing Act or some variation thereof -- I confess that I stopped counting after the first couple search pages on both counts -- and that’s not even counting the scores of books with the word 'disappearance' in their titles.

Something else I’ve noticed: even when a given book doesn’t have vanishing in the title, it very often has vanishing in the plot. (Full disclosure: I’m guilty of this in two novels). Once you begin looking for disappearance in the bookstore -- turning over jacket flaps and reading plot synopses -- it’s everywhere: our literature is full of abducted children, men and woman walking away from their lives, teenagers fading out into heroin cities.

And it isn’t that people don’t disappear in real life. There are haunting posters for an inexplicably absent forty-year-old woman all over my neighbourhood today, and Lawrence’s Vanishing is, after all, a memoir. Children set out for bike rides and never come back, men and women step out for the paper and never return. But real-life disappearances are unusual enough that when they happen, they generally make at least the local if not the national news and frequently fill airtime on CNN. People don’t disappear nearly as often in real life, it seems to me, as they do in fiction. I believe that we’re fascinated, as a culture, by the idea of vanishing.

2.
There’s a line that’s stayed with me from Martin Amis’ sensitive yet devastating look at Vladimir Nabokov’s body of work in the Guardian last year. “Writers like to write about the things they like to think about,” he wrote, in an examination of Nabokov’s unsettling insistence upon returning, in novel after novel, to the defilement of twelve-year-old girls.

Writers like to write about the things they like to think about: in the context of a pervasive fascination with disappearance, the most obvious explanation is that writers are, after all, just people, and a fascination with vanishing seems widespread in the general population: there are three apparently separate books entitled How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found on Amazon at the moment, one of them in print for the past thirteen years, and countless variations (How To Be Invisible; Cover Your Tracks Without Changing Your Identity; Hide Your Assets And Disappear).

I doubt there’s anyone among us who hasn’t at least once, at least fleetingly, fantasized about stepping out of our lives. In darker moments, it’s a tantalizing thought: the opportunity to start over, a new name, past mistakes erased. “After reading this book,” an anonymous Amazon customer wrote on one of the How To Disappear Completely review pages, “I spent hours at the public library copying obituaries of baby boys who were born and died around my birthday. I wanted to prepare myself to assume another identity one day. It was a delicious obsession, and exhilarating.”

3.
I would be interested to know how many of the readers of the disappearance how-to guides have actually disappeared, and how many, like the anonymous man copying obituaries in the library, buy the books in order to make the fantasy of disappearance more tangible. Not just a dream but a real possibility, now that you have a guide to the territory. We live in a strangely paradoxical time: on the one hand, there has never been a period in human history when we’ve been documented so relentlessly as we are now, so fingerprinted and photographed and bar-coded and taped. On the other hand, our identities seem somehow malleable. This is an era where a complete re-creation of self seems possible.

In Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply -- one of the great disappearance novels, in my opinion -- a recent high school graduate who’s assumed a new identity begins to wonder who she is. She has no parents; she’s left her older sister and her dreary hometown and set off into a frightening new life. Her name was once Lucy Lattimore, but that’s not the name on her passport. “More and more,” Chaon writes,

she was aware that Lucy Lattimore had left the earth. Already there was hardly anything left of her -- a few scraps of documents, birth certificate and social security card in her mother’s drawer back in the old house, her high school transcripts resident on some outdated computer, the memories of her sister Patricia, the vague recollections of her classmates and teachers, already fading.

The truth was, she had killed herself months ago. Now she was next to nothing: a nameless physical form that could be exchanged and exchanged and exchanged until nothing remained but molecules.

When I needed a copy of my birth certificate in order to claim American citizenship at the Montreal consulate, I ordered it online from a government website. I needed nothing but a credit card for the processing fee; the document arrived in the mail a few weeks later. It occurred to me later that I could have ordered anybody’s birth certificate, absolutely anybody’s, and that anyone else could have ordered mine.

4.
If writers like to write about the things we like to think about, and if we spend -- as the plot synopses on our dust jackets suggest -- an inordinate amount of time thinking about vanishing, another possibility we might consider is that the very act of writing fiction is in itself a kind of disappearance. And if you’re engaged in disappearance as a profession, doesn’t it make sense that it might become your theme?

We were raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Alice falls down a rabbit hole and steps through the looking glass, Max flees to an island populated by Wild Things, other children slip through the backs of wardrobes and through gaps in hedges and leave this world behind. Sitting down at a desk and slipping into a kingdom where the plot, the characters, the narrative arc, even the laws of physics are malleable and within your control is not, perhaps, terribly different. When you sit down to write a novel you step out of your life for a little while; it’s a separate world you’re creating on the page, wholly apart from the chaos and the disappointments of life on earth.