Love Makes the World Go Round
By Laurie Muchnick, STAFF WRITER

January 5, 2003

Imagine the scene: A successful 30-something couple, Hannah (a doctor) and Justin (a stay-at-home dad), take their two kids to the circus for their daughter Greta's seventh birthday. Their 5-year-old son, James, is sweet and imaginative but so quiet that his preschool teacher wants to hold him back for a year. So it's a surprise when James volunteers to be the assistant for the clown's big finale, and an even bigger surprise when he turns out to be a natural performer. But the biggest surprise of all happens at the end of the act, after the clown puts James on a chair and balances him on his chin: Without so much as a puff of smoke, James disappears. And doesn't come back.

This is the setup for Anne Ursu's seductive second novel, The Disapparation of James. The police treat James' disappearance as a kidnapping, installing a secure telephone line - as well as an officer to answer it - in the Woodrows' house. Hannah and Justin, however, intuitively understand that James hasn't been kidnapped, that there were no smoke and mirrors, that their son has simply vanished. Greta realizes this too, but unlike her mother, who can't get out of bed, and her father, who becomes obsessed with his own investigation, she sits in her playroom and draws pictures to help her remember James, and to have something to give him when he eventually returns (as she never doubts that he will).

Readers of Ursu's first novel, Spilling Clarence, should recognize the terrain - both books take place in a world that is somehow familiar yet fantastical. Spilling Clarence is about a town whose inhabitants are overwhelmed by memories of their pasts after a leak at a psychopharmaceutical factory. Like Hannah and Justin, the inhabitants of Clarence are so consumed by their own thoughts that they can no longer function. This is the realm of fairy tales, which is not to say that nothing bad happens. Both of these books focus on people filled with despair, but you always know that love and hope are going to triumph over sadness and fear. "I don't even know how they go on, loving something that much," says Tom Johnson, the police officer assigned to the Woodrow residence, but Ursu clearly thinks that it's only because they love something that much that the Woodrows have been so blessed. At least, until now.

Ursu uses an old-fashioned storytelling voice, with the narrator commenting sagely on the action and even taking detours such as an entire chapter called "The Saturday That Would Have Been": "In another universe, there is a Saturday morning like any other, in which the Woodrows wake up to an ordinary day, in which whatever happened did not happen, in which the fates were looking the other way, in which the clown never picked James, in which James did not raise his hand at all, in which James got a tummy ache and stayed home with one of his parents ... In this universe, James Woodrow lies safe in his bed, in between two stuffed bears, right where he is supposed to be, and Hannah and Justin wake up to another perfectly quotidian morning."

This quotidian day involves Hannah reading the newspaper while watching two birds hop around their backyard feeder; Greta getting ready for her birthday party; Justin running the entertainment at the party; and James hiding from all the girls, who think he's "so CUTE!" An ordinary, "perfectly quotidian" day, perhaps, but Ursu shows that it's actually infused with poetry. Like Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto," The Disapparation of James celebrates the glory of ordinary life in the midst of trauma.