4.5. I don’t know why I chose this as my first Oates book. I have others that are more popular and highly rated and shorter. Whatever drove me to pick this up first, I’m happy for it.

The events in this book are wonderfully realized. Ostensibly, this is a mystery. When a young girl in a tight knit town goes missing, everything seems to point to a veteran who once was engaged to her older sister, but are now estranged as he’s been hurt in his two tours overseas.

Hurt is the through line here. Surrounding the disappearance and the mystery, Carthage jumps around often, occupying family and community and beyond to shape the contours of its story. The format produces transcripts of conversations and letters, sometimes mixed with accompanying thoughts from the point of view character, sometimes just a document itself. The result is a vivid character study and a thorough examination of a historic event for said characters. The ripples of which are similarly traced into the future, rendering the hurt across time, rooting it in place, complex and dynamic psychology, long-term effects, and stark contradictions.

I think plot fiends are the ones that must have driven the rating for this book so far down. It would feel meandering if it wasn’t so methodical and explicit in its goals to elucidate the
systemic issues in American society (Western culture writ large). Blame isn’t so much a thing to be assigned, as it is in most genre fiction that people may conflate this with, it’s a subject to be examined along with the disappearance itself. How useful is it? How do we arrive at it? Who gets to assign it? A normal production would point to a person and say, ‘There. That’s the one responsible.’ And the book would be over. Here it’s a good start, but we can do better.

This is almost a reverse engineering of a crime. And how did we get here? And where and how and what do we do with that contemporary hurt?

Craft-wise, I was particularly struck by the foreshadowing. Oates notices and points to—correctly, I think—how much influence those around us have. There are seemingly throw away lines of dialogue that show the dynamics of the relationship. Especially initially, with the family interactions between the two daughters, father, and mother. The father throws cruel castaway comparisons between his daughters and peacocks in a way that is both charming in a men-who- are-socialized-Correctly-will-like-this-man-kind-of-way, but is actually clearly toxic and, sadly, formative for his children. Those callously dropped lines have a ring of truth to me, because all people I know similarly wield their influence like this. They drop bomb-like words that lift or crush and imagine the responsibility is on the listener; unable to empathize with those they speak with. Characters in Carthage spout truisms that, if one could snatch them from the air to examine, similarly indict the systems we’ve erected to help us, but actually beat us bloody daily.

The prose and sentence-by-sentence text is engaging and similarly methodical. It won’t be for everyone, but even when it’s annoying repetitive, it’s in service to the psychology of the character. It’s pretty singular and interesting seeing Oates’ voice fill a person up. There’s a chameleon quality to it. Intelligence matched to diction and unusual cadences wrapped up in neurosis. All of them topped to the brim with humanity. Everyone is shitty and everyone is generous and kind. In a story where you expect to presented with someone to hate, what do you do when you understand every variable and aspect of those involved?

You’re left with the impeccable themes to contemplate, as well as an interiority that manifests from occupying other people so fully human.