The best short stories have something about them, a tightness, a sparse sense of prose that still allows for moments of lyricism. Dan Chaon has got the art right, Among the Missing is composed of an even dozen stories and there were only two of them that felt less than wonderfully fulfilled.
All the stories live firmly in the real world and yet manage to venture off towards all manner of strange possibilities without once stretching your sense of believability, although you do occasionally wonder how much you can trust what the characters tell you.
Title: Among the Missing (Ballantine Reader’s Circle)
Author: Dan Chaon
LC Rating:
Can you have memories of things that never happened? Do the countless possibilities that surround every choice live their own lives and occasionally step ghost-like into this world? What exactly is it that goes on inside the heads of all these people who populate our lives?
These are the sorts of themes Dan Chaon touches on. What I appreciated is he never engages in overt moralizing, indeed some of the morality on display is quite questionable, but always intriguing, and intensely recognizable as human. Two of the stories in here, “Big Me” and “Passengers, Remain Calm” are each as good as any piece of short writing I have read in a long time.
Myself, I plan on checking out the rest of the stuff that Chaon has written and that is the highest compliment I can pay a book. Among the Missing deserves it.
February 8th, 2006 at 8:19 am
I have to say, I trust your literary opinions. I read “Incident…Dog…Night-Time.” Great book even though I can never remember the full title. I cheated and got a copy from the Teen section of the KPL instead of waiting 40 days like the rest of the grown-ups. Was I the only one that felt a little bit autistic at the end of the book or was that normal?
February 8th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
I’ll confess I felt a bit autistic at the end, (of reading “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”)or at least assumed I did, I certainly felt different, and that is the goal of all good writing.
Oh… and if I can be forgiven a moment of moralizing… never never wait around like the grown-ups.