Gone. For good?
Remember when everything was vampires? Every book cover was black, dripping with blood, every heroine an antifeminist throwback? Then “Gone Girl” leaped into the pool and coolly held “Twilight” under the water until it died. Gillian Flynn’s book has spawned a whole culture of obsessive interest in the ways that women are dangerous. Not only do they have agency, they are malicious and twisted, post-romantic and middleaged, sick to death of children and patriarchy. They abandon their families and frame their husbands for murder. They cannot hold back the resentments and furies that have been building for — well, centuries. Snow White no longer captures our interest, now we want to befriend the Evil Queen and watch her poison everyone.
Janelle Brown’s addictive “Watch Me Disappear” is one of this new breed. The novel opens at an intimate family picnic at which Jonathan, wife Billie and daughter Olive are sitting on a windswept Northern California beach, radiant in their bliss. Billie worries that their daughter is too soft. That life will eat her up. Yet in the cavern beneath this motherly concern runs a trickle of truth: that Billie is more upset at Olive’s pouty, teenage individuation, that her daughter doesn’t idolize her anymore. One has the sense that in advance of rejection, she might be planning to flee.
A week later, Billie is dead. She goes missing while hiking alone in Desolation Wilderness. They can’t find her body, but they do find a shoe.
Naturally, Jonathan and Olive are devastated. They are soft in an upper-middle-class way, the Berkeley poster family: Jonathan gave up his tech journalism job to write a book, Olive is a private school girl, preciously self-conscious of her privilege, angsty about climate change and homelessness. Olive begins having visions of her mother, who taunts her for being complacent and challenges her to find out what really happened. She comes to believe that her mother is still alive. Jonathan panics and drags her to a doctor for a medieval-style autoda-fe — she is having epileptic seizures and must be drugged. But Olive is no martyr. She throws away the drugs and tries to accept her “hallucinations” as being no less valid than her thoughts and feelings. And she wouldn’t be institutionalized for those. (Would she?)
It’s too late for Jonathan. Olive’s doubt has lodged in his mind. The memoir he’s writing of his perfect love for Billie begins to splinter. He sees what he was unable to see before — her dissatisfactions, awkwardly covered up, her irrepressible desires hinting at a person he may not have known at all. He remembers how Olive once wanted to go to church, and Billie was so upset that she ran away, leaving them worried, guilt-stricken and angry.
While this vision of Billie conjures the wrath of an ancient goddess, it is the solemn investigation of Jonathan and Olive that lends the book its terrible gravity. Like the Egyptian Ma’at, who weighs the human heart against a feather in judging who deserves passage to the afterlife, father and daughter inspect their missing woman and scrutinize everything she did in the last year of her life. Was she cheating? Skimming money from the joint account for a private fund? Planning an Eat-PrayLove? Or is she really dead? Jonathan’s shift from tragic grief to angry suspicion is fast and damning. Secretly, he hopes that she’s dead.
“Watch Me Disappear” is just as riveting as “Gone Girl,” but without its full-scale pathos. The question that looms over the book is how to feel about Billie, but equally how Billie must have felt inside the cloying duties of her family. Wisely, Brown doesn’t reveal Billie’s fate until the end, and it is almost a disappointment to find out, because in some ways not knowing was much more rewarding. Yet the characters are arresting, the Berkeley setting delightfully authentic, and, best of all, the propulsive investigation may make you want to go into hiding just to finish the book now.