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Among the Missing (Paperback)

by Dan Chaon (Author) "Safety Man is all shriveled and puckered inside his zippered nylon carrying tote, and taking him out is always the hardest part ..." (more)

4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Paperback: 274 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (Jan 29 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345441613
ISBN-13: 978-0345441614
Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 13.8 x 1.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 323 g

Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #118,306 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Amazon.com

Dan Chaon opens his new collection of stories with an epigraph from Raymond Carver: "Whatever this was all about, it was not a vain attempt--journey." This is pretty opaque stuff from Carver, a writer not much given to mystification. But it strikes just the right note for Chaon's assembly of characters, a group vaguely unsettled by life, trying to make the best of it. First and foremost, this is a book beset by moms. You get the feeling that the characters in Among the Missing never really had a chance to figure out the world, with these cryptic, uncommunicative women to care for them. In the title story, for example, a car is discovered at the bottom of a local lake, with an entire family drowned inside. The college-age narrator, however, is preoccupied by the more mundane puzzle of his parents' relationship. "Somehow," he recounts, "they'd stayed married for twenty years, and then, abruptly, somehow they'd decided to give up. It didn't quite make sense, and I looked at them, for a minute aware of the other mystery in my life. 'Do you want some soup?' my mother asked, as if I were a customer."

That's about as much as you'll ever get out of one of Chaon's mothers: soup. When not fielding their aging parents' passivity, these characters seem to spend a lot of time grappling with ghosts. The "missing" of the title story are, literally, gone. In "Safety Man," a widow comes to rely on one of those inflatable dolls meant to intimidate intruders. In "Prosthesis," a young wife and mother falls for a stranger with a missing arm; meanwhile, she watches her son grow up and away from her, "disappearing into his own thoughts and feelings." In the end, Chaon is the rare writer who deserves comparison to Carver: both write an affectless prose that takes on a surprisingly emotional life of its own. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In the 12 quietly accomplished stories of his second collection, Chaon explores the complicated geography of human relationships, from the unintentional failures and minute betrayals of daily existence to the numbing grief caused by abandonment, disappearance or death. Specific and disquieting absences an uncle who killed himself, a mother who vanished, a friend who was kidnapped haunt the protagonists, and a series of metaphoric and literal stand-ins take the place of what's missing. In "Safety Man," a dummy intended for crime deterrence propped in the passenger seat, it looks like a male companion becomes a kind of surrogate husband for a young widow, and for her daughters, an inflatable father; in "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me," a woman caring for her incarcerated brother-in-law's macaw comes to loathe the bird, its ugly talk transforming it into a symbol of everything wrong and incomprehensible about him. By and large, Chaon's characters are citizens of the emotional hinterlands, lonely even when surrounded: "How did people go about falling in love, getting married, having families, living their lives?" Even those who think they know the answers recognize their powerlessness, such as the father who, looking into his son's eyes, thinks, "I am aware that hatred is a definite possibility at the end of the long tunnel of parenthood, and I suspect that there is little one can do about it." And yet these stories are neither morbid nor even particularly melancholic. Singularly dedicated to an examination of all the profundity and strangeness of the quotidian, they are, in their best moments, unsettling, moving, even beautiful. (July 3)Forecast: A jacket blurb by Lorrie Moore and a five-city author tour may help sell this understated collection, which will be respectfully reviewed but may be overlooked on bookstore shelves.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Safety Man is all shriveled and puckered inside his zippered nylon carrying tote, and taking him out is always the hardest part. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

17 Reviews

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
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Average Customer Review

4.9 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Alfred Hitchcock Meets Raymond Carver, Jun 28 2004

By	mr_goodwill - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among the Missing (Hardcover)

Penetrating stories about many things that is left unsaid in our lives, especially within families. Wrong decisions, sinister possibilities, regrets, premonitions, embarrassing memories, parents and loved ones who suddenly disappear one day and are never heard from again...

These are moving and memorable stories with danger lurking right along the surface, but always revolving around the dilemmas of human condition at their center.

A married woman with children who ends up living with an inflatable doll...

A macaw who talks too much and utters very dangerous things each time he opens his beak...

Fathers and sons, trying to make peace with themselves while opening some old doors in their lives that perhaps should never have been touched...

Many haunting stories about relationships not consummated to their fullest, lives impacted by the memories of others far away.

The writer holds a powerful projector to the amazing complexity and darkness of the human predicament in passages like:

"How many small, offhand choices had led her to the college where they met, had led her to the room where they first looked at one another... How many people were forever different, how many people ceased to exist every time she turned one way rather than another? Surely, if it were so random, she could not be held accountable?" (Prosthesis, p. 159)

But there is still hope that we can turn things around perhaps with the right intuition and perspective:

"What if you believed that everything in life was like a prize? What if you thought of the world as a big random drawing, and you were always winning things, the world offering them up with a big grin, like an emcee's: Here you go, Hollis. Here is a motorcycle. Here is a little boy who loves you. Here is a weird experience..." (Passengers, Remain Calm, p. 116)

Dan Chaon, like Ethan Canin, is fast becoming one of my most favorite fiction writers from the younger generation. There are plenty writers out there who can come up with "interesting" characters and spin a page-turner "plot." But rare are those specially gifted pens who can reach the hidden corners of our souls and address all those fears, unspoken hurts and unrealized dreams like Chaon.

A must read if you love short stories.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Among the better collections, May 19 2004

By	ostawookiee "ostawookiee" (Winston-Salem, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among the Missing (Hardcover)

Chaon's stories somehow all feel so real. The situations, the relationships, the feelings and motivations, they just seem so plausible, more so than any other short story collection I've read. Some of the stories have made me nostalgic about my own past, and relationships with family.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful works only get better, May 6 2003

By	Michael Brown (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This stunning collection of short stories have an awe-inspiring effect upon the reader. The sparseness of the prose and the subtlety of the writing makes it seem like a steady, smooth breeze.No one will walk away empty-handed from these stories. The book aspires to and achieves what great literature is: transformative.....

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories of the Non-Glamourous life
Among the Missing is filled with great stories, stories about the kinds of people you wouldn't ordinarily hear about. Read more

Published on Nov 2 2002 by Elizabeth Hendry

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Enlightening!
What these marvelously stirring stories underscore is the fact that our ability to understand the motivations of other's actions is often severely hampered by our own subjective... Read more

Published on May 30 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars Nothing Missing Here
It's amazing, in a sad way, how many readers believe the short story genre to be either a training ground for the young novelist, or fiction light. Read more

Published on Mar 26 2002 by Roberta Proctor

5.0 out of 5 stars No duds here!
I am not typically a reader of short story collections, there are usually too many mediocre efforts thrown in with the odd good one. Read more

Published on Mar 22 2002 by J. Fercho