Vanished

After Oprah selected Mary McGarry Morris's SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME for her book club, Morris's early novel, VANISHED, was reissued. A young woman named Dotty appears out of nowhere, picks up the hapless and seemingly helpless Aubrey Wallace, kidnaps (for no clear reason) an unrelated baby girl, and drags them both on a sad, drug-soaked odyssey. Dotty is soon ready to abandon the odd family she herself has created, but Wallace and the girl won't be easy to shake. Kimberley Schraf's narrative voice has a suitably gritty hard edge. But she strains when she vocalizes some of the characters, ending up with a colorless monotone for Wallace and a false, high-pitched stereotype of a child. S.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

June 3, 1988
In Morris's strong and painful first novel Aubrey Wallace, a simple, goodhearted laborer on a Vermont road crew, thinks the frail girl who beckons to him from a wooded stream looks like a picture book fairy. And like some malevolent enchantress, Dottycute, tarty, amoral and utterly freaked outenthralls Aubrey and lures him away from his family to his ultimate ruin. Sexually mistreated as a child, Dotty has committed atrocities that surface only later in the narrative. She has also kidnapped a baby girl named Canny. Now Dotty enlists Aubrey's help in making a wandering, criminal half-life for the three of them, as they bounce around the countryside for five years in a pickup truck. When they run into degenerate ex-con Jiggy Huller, living in backwoods squalor with his bovine wife Alma and their sad little girls, Dotty is nearly outmatched. A clumsy scheme is cobbled to collect ransom money from Canny's wealthy parents. But Aubrey loves poor-nit-infested, rheumy-eyed Canny, who clings to him screaming with terror, ``Don't dump me, Poppy.'' The story drives inexorably to its cynical and wrenching climax, fueled on booze, drugs and human misery.