Parenthood can be rife with worst case scenarios, all of them truly the worst. It’s a state I was blissfully unaware of when I was a young father still set in youth’s phase of invincibility, but now that I’m a grandfather, I often worry about higher stakes. All those potential worst cases now hovering around the child of a child or the care for an elderly parent. Oh, the growth of ways for the heart to break. It’s almost too much to bear. These are the struggles of Ben Tanzer’s latest novel The Missing.
Seventeen-year-old Christa, daughter of Gabriel and Hannah has gone missing. She likely has left voluntarily with her older boyfriend. She might even be happy. Would that make it any better? What can Gabriel and Hannah do about it? What have they done to cause her to abandon them? Can they ever get back what they have lost?
Trying to find all the things they hadn’t seen coming, Gabriel and Hannah are forced to relook at everything around them. Rather than following the conventional route of suspense and mystery on the street, Tanzer takes an admirable path of focusing on the internal battle. This is no safer place. Entire wars are fought inside our heads, often at the wrong times and disproportionate to the battles taking place outside. There is no Geneva convention here. Everything goes in the mind’s war on others and itself.
Tanzer is the author of several previous books including the novel Orphans that used a dystopian future to explore manhood and what that means in the workplace and the family. Tobias Carrol in Vol. 1 Brooklyn said about Orphans that “Tanzer has established himself as an adept chronicler of a particular type of middle-class male anxiety.” With The Missing, Tanzer expands that to parental anxiety and, through the deeply developed Hannah, fittingly given the last voice in the closing chapter, he explores particular types of female anxiety as well under the various pressures parenthood and life have inflicted on the marriage. Dysfunctional as it is, Gabriel and Hannah are an equal team in this journey and through them Tanzer explores the ways we can lose each other.
The Missing is told in brief confessional chapters alternating between Gabriel and Hannah’s points of view. Keeping the chapters short prevents any preference to one of the voices. When you leave one, you know it will be brief, and you’ll soon return to the other. This also creates a feeling of constant movement. Even when the characters might be unable to move, to reach out and grab a solution to their problems, their propel forward is to tell their side of the story, hoping they can learn to understand it along the way. Their past is a complicated one, mined to understand their present dilemmas. Their need to understand why Christa left is as strong as their desire to find their daughter, who in a sense has ghosted her parents. This is where the title takes on extra meaning, The Missing deftly representing both singularity and plurality. Christa is overtly missing, but not all of the missing ones have completely vanished. The real missing are the ones left behind, stuck somewhere between life and death, forced now to haunt themselves. Hannah:
I need to own something: ever since Officer John came to the house, I find it hard to breathe, to stay focused, and to not feel all my fears at once as they run around my brain—the lost mothers, daughters, and lives wasted. I can manage it. One can manage anything for a while. I’m not sure, however, I can maintain it.
This format gives the characters multiple ways to unpack the story. They dive into the past, look for cause, look at themselves or each other, and try to find someone to blame. When the struggle is too intense, they lose the ability to go long, leaving just the heart to keep the poetic rhythm. Gabriel:
I haven’t always been present, and I hate myself for that.
Who we become when we don’t police ourselves.
Slipping away.
Losing self.
Becoming the worst version of what we might be.
That’s the thing.
It’s seven weeks since Christa went missing.
I’m trying to be present for her.
I can barely check the Facebook page, but I do.
Nothing.
As Gabriel and Hannah drift apart, their chapters respond to each other more than they do in their personal conversations. Maximizing their turn, the characters navigate the external life while exposing internal thoughts, stories, and arguments stretched to new limits. As a small example of rotating blows, Gabriel remembers meeting Hannah when they were kids and his big move of asking her about the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He recalls pride in being ready for however she might respond. In the next chapter, Hannah remembers how annoying she found his Close Encounters question. This on the nose point and counterpoint is a license easily accepted because it’s fun, it’s done genuinely, these are the ways we all remember things differently, and it deeply develops these characters. The connected exchanges are an inside joke, stemming from the magic of fiction, that enable us all to get closer when our natural tendencies are to keep distant. Even in first person invocation, is the author’s consciousness ever really absent? In this chaptered dynamic, Tanzer creates a pool where everyone swims together: Gabriel, Hannah, the author, and the reader. And, just when we get comfortable with this pattern, Tanzer slams us with a truth that is now more powerful in the light of counterpoint than it might have been without dual perspectives.
There’s a strange and beautiful gleam of hope that comes through this structure of lost conversation. What if there was a magical healing plane or a way of maneuvering through the universe where two people are so connected that they find a way to dialogue through chapters, by the internal stories they tell themselves in order to understand the things that they no longer have the strength to speak to each other?
To do all of this, the book boldly leans into the internal landscape. Dramatic scene is almost always subordinate to mental processing. One peak example of this is a moment where Gabriel takes Hannah to the hospital. Through the entire scene, the narrative camera stays on Gabriel’s mind rather than the cinematic perspective often seen in current fiction. This structure leads to an intense empathy for the character’s status as well as a matching mental fatigue. Just as the experience is wearing on the character, we are drawn in so close that we can also feel the strain. It becomes a palpable experience with us becoming these characters, their close confidant, or perhaps their counselor.
To some extent, acting this way is Gabriel and Hannah’s only choice. There is no Liam Neeson to fight the bad guys and save their daughter. The real world doesn’t work that way. Instead, they must remember and understand the things they have all done to get to this point. It’s the only way they can make it out. In the skilled hands of Tanzer, Gabriel and Hannah go all in. They boldly leave no thought or memory or personal story on the table.
In a world where short attention spans and endless media options seem to be winning a war on reading, Tanzer has maximized a special territory of the novel: extreme attention and internal processing. It can be tempting for writers to go the other way and try to appeal to the short attention span or to the comfort zone found in the dramatic point of view. Novels that go to this opposite end of perspective can often feel stripped down and unemotional, keeping a firm distance between the “us” watching and the “them” moving. Characters might be pushed to their limits and, like Robert McKee argues, this is where true character is revealed, but action has limitations in what is revealed as well. We might see clearly what they do while being obscured from why. The first reaction to being pushed to a limit has to be the thoughts. Left alone in exclusively dramatic points of view, I want to shout at the characters: “Hey, let me in!”
There is no such need to yell at Tanzer’s Gabriel or Hannah. I just want to give them a hug.
The Missing, by Ben Tanzer. Brooklyn Heights, New York: 7.13 Books, March 2024. 272 pages. $19.99, paper.
Al Kratz is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa. He’s a member of the National Book Critics Circle and author of The Tony Bone Stories from Ad Hoc Fiction. More about his work can be found at alkratz.com.
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