[Stewart_O'Nan]Songs for the Missing : A Novel(azw, epub, lrf, mobi){Zzzzz}

Book Description

Returning again to the theme of working-class people and their wrenching concerns, Songs for the Missing begins with the suspenseful pace of a thriller, following an Ohio community?s efforts to locate a young woman who has gone missing. It soon deepens into an affecting portrait of a family trying desperately to hold onto itself and the memory of a daughter whose return becomes increasingly unlikely. Stark and honest, this is an intimate account of what happens behind the headlines of a very American tragedy.

Viking Adult | English | October 30, 2008 | ISBN: 067002032X | 320 pages | azw, epub, lrf, mobi | 3,6 mb

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. O'Nan proves that uncertainty can be the worst punishment of all in this unflinching look at an unraveling family. In the small town of Kingsville, Ohio, 18-year-old Kim Larsen—popular and bound for college in the fall—disappears on her way to work one afternoon. Not until the next morning do her parents, Ed and Fran, and 15-year-old sister, Lindsay, realize Kim is missing. The lead detective on the case tells the Larsens that since Kim is an adult, she could, if the police find her, ask that the police not disclose her location to her parents. When Kim's car later turns up in nearby Sandusky, Ed, desperate to help, joins the official search. Meanwhile, Fran stays home putting all her energy into community fund-raisers, and Lindsay struggles to maintain a normal life. Through shifting points of view, chiefly those of the shell-shocked parents and the moody Lindsay, O'Nan raises the suspense while conveying the sheer torture of what it's like not to know what has happened to a loved one. When—if ever—do you stop looking? 6-city author tour. (Nov.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Stewart O'Nan has quietly written his way to the top rank of American novelists working today, and Songs for the Missing showcases his skill for molding character-driven novels remarkable for their clarity of vision and an unflinching eye for situations that lay bare human emotion. There is little spectacular here, save for O'Nan's storytelling abilities and his uncanny knowledge of how one event can send out ripples that affect everyone in a small Midwestern town (incidentally, the author's old stomping grounds). Even more satisfying and heartbreaking is O'Nan's understanding of what happens when the lights dim, attention fades, and people are left to live their lives.
From Booklist
O’Nan’s latest novel delves with uncanny empathy into the tangled emotions of a family in sustained crisis. The Larsens are an average midwestern family until Kim, 18, disappears one summer afternoon on the way to her job at the local Conoco station. As hours turn into days, months, and finally more than three years, O’Nan illuminates the lives of family and friends changed by this tragedy. Kim’s mother throws herself into a frenzy of America’s Most Wanted activity—appearing on posters, Web sites, and television shows—all the while regretting the increasing distance between her and Kim in the months before her disappearance. Kim’s father morphs into a detective—shadowing the police, living in cheap motels, and tacking up flyers by the thousands. Kim’s younger sister feels lost in the shuffle and struggles to stay out of the unwelcome spotlight. Her best friends and boyfriend go off to college guiltily, feeling as though they should stay, forever frozen in search mode. O’Nan brings each character to life so perceptively, the reader becomes completely enmeshed in this sad story. --Deborah Donovan
Review
"Songs For The Missing is both profound and profoundly beautiful. A haunting meditation on the power of those we lose, its emotional resonance defies description. Like most of Stewart O'Nan's work, my ultimate response was the highest praise one writer can pay another: envy. I so dearly wish I'd written it."
—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

“Taut prose and matter-of-fact detail enrich this compelling portrait of teenage life in small-town Ohio, as the disappearance of a popular girl on the cusp of leaving home for college changes the communal dynamic of family and friends.
The latest from O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster, 2007, etc.) initially reads like a whodunit, but who or why become less important than the character of the vanished Kim Larsen from the differing memories of those who knew her best—or thought they did—and the ways in which Kim's disappearance allows all sorts of revelations to come to light. The opening chapter is the only one that views Kim's life from her own perspective: the job she tolerates, the little sister who occasionally annoys her, the parents whose tension between them sometimes rises to the surface, the friends with whom she shares routines and some confidences, the boyfriend with whom she isn't serious enough to stay with past the summer. She anticipates college as an escape from the town where "every night they fought a war against boredom and lost," yet she's understandably apprehensive about living away from home. Then she disappears, putting her parents into a panic, forcing her friends to decide which secrets to reveal, uniting the community in its attempts to aid the search and offer support to the family. Will Kim's disappearance end her parents' marriage or make it stronger? Is there a logical explanation, a motive, or is this simply evidence of "the world's incoherence"? Though the author sustains narrative momentum through the conventions of the police procedural (with chapter headings such as "Description of the Person, When Last Seen" and "Known Whereabouts"), ultimately the novel is less about a possible crime than about the interconnections of small-town life. "The problem was that everything was connected," thinks one of Kim's friends. "One lie covered another, which covered a third, which rested against a fourth. It all went back to Kingsville being so goddamn small."
A novel in which every word rings true.”
—Kirkus (starred) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Stewart O’Nan is the author of eleven novels, most recently Last Night at the Lobster, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Stewart O'Nan is a daredevil minimalist, an ardent student of the things people do in between the exciting things other authors write about. In his most recent novel, Last Night of the Lobster, he described the final 10 hours of a Red Lobster restaurant in a Connecticut shopping mall. A fire? A gunman? Legionnaire's disease? No, just budget cuts handed down from the main office. The cooks, waitresses and manager all know what's coming, and so do we. It's a story practically allergic to suspense, but the sensitivity of O'Nan's voice makes it strangely compelling. Now, 12 months later, his new novel, Songs for the Missing, seems like a sellout. The first chapter sets up a classic thriller premise, strewn with ominous clues: A pretty 18-year-old girl named Kim Larsen leaves her friends at the beach and drives to her part-time job at a gas station. She never arrives. That night her parents notice she hasn't come home. They call her classmates. They call the hospital. They call the police. We know how this should play out: the accrual of alarming details, mixed with a few false leads; growing suspicion that the devoted father/mother/sister/dog is hiding something; a horrific vision of the crime from the victim's or the murderer's point of view; and finally a shocking revelation. But O'Nan ignores all these conventions in favor of an approach so mundane you can't believe it works, the thriller equivalent of watching blood dry. He's a connoisseur of waiting, and it's his discipline, his refusal to deviate even for a single sentence from the uneventful, dull terror of losing a child, that makes Songs of the Missing so troubling. Kim's disappearance is at the heart of this novel, but its real concern is with her family members. They have no way of knowing if they're dealing with a simple misunderstanding, an act of teenage rebellion or a capital crime. Even starting the search in earnest seems to Kim's parents like a horrible admission of disaster, but when the initial round of phone calls yields nothing, her father, Ed, feels impelled to do something, get in his car and find her. "They would all laugh at him later, he imagined, Dad freaking out, driving around like a maniac. That was fine with him, as long as she was all right. He didn't expect to see anything." O'Nan follows the trajectory of Ed's panicked thoughts with quiet sympathy: "He'd felt helpless at times in his life, over money troubles most recently, or, more often, the unhappiness of a loved one. This was different. His usually reliable talents of hustle and attention to detail were worthless against the unknown, and he was frightened." Kim's mother, Fran, is equally afraid, but she reacts differently. As a nurse, "she honored calmness above all, trusting efficiency over emotion." Most of the novel focuses on the mechanics of their search, which Fran pursues with unwavering self-control, an astute study in the way men and women respond to crisis. "The feeling of uselessness nagged" at Ed, but Fran throws herself into these exhausting routines, if only to forestall a descent into madness. "There was a logical order to their panic," Fran thinks. "Every failure led to the next step." Here once again, O'Nan proves himself the patron saint of labor. These frantic parents have so much to do besides worry: assembling lists of names to contact; canvassing the town with posters; organizing hundreds of volunteers for grid-by-grid searches; staging a "Kare-a-Van for Kim"; ordering buttons, T-shirts and balloons; and trolling through thousands of leads that pour in from witnesses, cranks, psychics and well-wishers. And there are Web sites to monitor and daily blog entries to post -- a whole industry of grieving parents pedaling scraps of hope to each other around the country. More depressing is O'Nan's clear-eyed portrayal of the media and their double-edged role in these tragedies. "The networks were hungry for missing girl stories," he writes. Fran realizes early that her daughter's disappearance needs to be marketed to get what she wants: maximum exposure as quickly as possible. Even while terrified by thoughts of what might have happened, she must carefully choose the right clothing ("A white blouse would turn into a blob of light" on TV) and train herself to deliver an appropriate appeal. "You don't want to come off as hysterical," a friend advises. "You don't want to be too cool either. . . . It's like advertising." Kim's sister is pushed into the glare of publicity, too: "You're like a celebrity," a well-meaning classmate tells her. Stripped of drama, here is the whole tedious, humiliating, heart-rending work of searching for a loved one. What holds our attention through all this is O'Nan's careful focus on the minds of shaken family members trapped in a task that consumes their lives and their livelihood. "It was how they told time," O'Nan writes. "They'd picked up the awkward yardstick used by new parents. . . . They counted backwards, snagged on that last day." Forced to go through the motions of hope long after real hope has drained away, they eventually reach that unspeakable place of just wishing it were all over. Ed "no longer looked forward to anything," O'Nan writes. "Pretending to be interested took a constant effort. When he was by himself, he went slack." In scene after scene, these spare descriptions will make you catch your breath. Some are just frozen moments: Fran sitting in her daughter's car in the garage, "both hands on the wheel, as if she was actually going somewhere." Others are masterfully designed sequences: Fran shopping all day for Christmas presents, determined to get her missing daughter just the right thing. In the end, Kim's family receives neither the resolution they hoped for nor the one they feared. The world that O'Nan captures thwarts our expectations for cathartic tragedy or gleeful celebration, which makes the story even more devastating. This isn't the nightmare of losing your daughter; this is the numbing reality of it.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From AudioFile
Emily Janice Card helps us zoom in on the family and friends left behind when 18-year-old Kim disappears. Her mother, Fran, is capable and busy, and Card gives her an almost-professional terseness that cracks occasionally when she turns to her husband for comfort. Husband Ed has a gruffer voice, but there's more tenderness and sensitivity in Card's expression of him. Their 15-year-old, Lindsay, uses IM and computer games to stay aloof, but Card conveys her internal feelings of emptiness and confusion. With tension pervading all the story's viewpoints, Card voices the characters as they adjust to grief and sadness, and attempt to resume their lives as best they can. S.W © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

More About the Author
Biography
Stewart O'Nan's award-winning fiction includes Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Emily, Alone. Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Customer Reviews

How sudden loss affects a family
By C. Anderson VINE VOICE on September 2, 2008

Meet Kim Larsen. She is eighteen years old, pretty and popular, and about a month away from leaving for college and the wider world. She can hardly wait. Like most small town kids, she and her friends chafe from the sameness and boredom of daily life. They drink more than they should and experiment a bit with drugs. But they are good kids at heart and are so looking forward to going away, being on their own, growing up.

Then, somewhere in the short distance between her home and her workplace, she seemingly vanishes into thin air. No trace of her, or her car. No one has seen anything. She's just gone. This is the story of those left behind. The author changes the point of view for each chapter and the reader feels the reaction of each person: Mom, Dad, sister, best friend, boyfriend. We see how they react and try to cope with the reality of Kim's loss.

Her Mom Fran gets organized, makes lists, makes calls, starts a website, talks to the press.

Her Dad Ed gets outside, taking the lead in the numerous searches that start immediately and continue for months.

Her younger sister Lindsay retreats into herself, a book, her I-Pod, the tv, the computer. Anything to keep people away. Especially her parents who can't resist the impulse to smother their remaining child with protectiveness. More than anyone else, this is her story.

Young girls disappear every day, not only in the US but around the world. Many are never seen again and their fates are often never known. Songs for the Missing gives you a glimpse of the flattening anguish and grief that the loved ones suffer when this happens.

Despite the emotional subject matter, this book is a surprisingly easy read. The author's smooth and comfortable style allow the reader to sink into the story, empathize with the characters, be a member of that family. Stewart O'Nan is a talented writer who has written a book that will resonate long after you finish it.


Tough Topic - Well Done
By My2Cents TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on November 9, 2008

What would do if your teen aged daughter disappeared without a trace? When--if ever--do you stop looking for her?

This is exactly what happens to Kim Larsen, age 18, popular, a