Into Thin Air
Reviewed by Gregory Feeley

The loss of one's child represents an endpoint in the range of the unthinkable, an almost metaphysical enormity that even non-parents can apprehend, if only intellectually. A book or a movie about a child's death can be more distressing than one about the ravages of war, and somehow we can contemplate even the end of the world with more equanimity than the possibility that our children will not outlive us.

Anne Ursu's second novel confronts this extremity directly but from an odd angle: Justin and Hannah Woodrow, doting and unremarkable parents, lose their son, 5-year-old James, when a stage clown makes him disappear. Presented with the observed detail and social nuance of a New Yorker story, the scene of a family outing that culminates in James's being brought onstage to participate in a magic trick is faintly shocking. We are familiar with stories that focus on the traumatic aftermath of something bad happening to a child, but not one that does it by using a bit of unabashed fabulism. "Where did you put my boy? Where is my son?" demands Justin, with a dawning horror that the reader -- cued by the novel's title and prepared like all readers for fiction's potential to swerve into narrative extremes -- has already anticipated.

The tactic we see unfolding seems dubious; the straightforward recourse to fantasy (it is clear that no rational explanation will be forthcoming) seems crassly unsuited to the book's subject, a kind of Robert Coover Lite. But where events in stories such as Coover's "A Pedestrian Accident" and "The Hat Act" usually spiral into ever-greater ruptures with reality, the disapparation of Ursu's novel closes itself up. It is a onetime event whose effect passes through the Woodrow family like a bullet. Ursu dramatizes the period of unending panic that follows such an event -- the arrival of the police, the questions, the welling sense of terror -- with an acuity that is, despite her novel's relatively short chapters, unremitting. The narrative may follow Hannah's or Justin's point of view, but there is no respite from such an ordeal, not even in sleep.

Underscoring this, Ursu offers a chapter that presents the next day as it should have been: a birthday party for their daughter, Greta, during which James, giddy from his triumph the night before, copes with a houseful of 7-year-olds and falls asleep early. The chapter that follows this ("What Actually Happens") snaps the reader back to the story line with the effect of a slap. This break with linear narrative has the strange effect of intensifying the element of horror rather than distancing the reader from it.

An obvious thing to say is that Ursu realizes that a child's disappearance is itself unnatural. And indeed the text suggests as much: Hannah reflects that "the rules have changed, the sky has opened, the fabric that holds the world together has ripped, and the people that [she] loves are falling through," while Justin is similarly affected: "Maybe the loss of his son has driven [him] mad, but the loss of James itself is madness."

But the "disapparation" is not simply a literalized metaphor or a device deployed in service of a point; the novel's realistic and fantastic elements intertwine too thoroughly for the reader to declare one a means and the other an end. (Even the chapter "The Saturday That Would Have Been," with its vision of calamity averted, contains odd images of emptiness and vacancy, right where a schematic reading says they wouldn't be.) The events of the days that follow -- the clown, arrested and questioned, cannot account for what happened; Justin finds himself obsessed with rescue fantasies, while 7-year-old Greta sets about matter-of-factly dealing with a problem she only imperfectly understands -- are quietly ravaging.

James's unnatural disappearance is a singularity that neither police work nor magic can explain, let alone undo, and its complex interaction with the novel's realistic elements -- so different from the simple accretion of realistic detail with which other writers, Stephen King for instance, have sought to dramatize the horror of a child in danger -- manages to seriously creep out the reader. What happens in the rest of the novel should not be described here, for, despite its postmodern embrace of artifice, Ursu's novel manages to elicit from the reader a very old-fashioned response: anxiety for what will come next. Mysterious and ultimately moving, The Disapparation of James powerfully evokes the tenderness of the bond between parent and child, and the parent's never-ending awareness of its fragility

Gregory Feeley writes frequently about speculative fiction.