The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

August 20, 2018
Norwegian novelist Houm’s austerely wrenching and darkly comic novel, his first to be published in English, is assembled out of jagged pieces that gradually cohere to reveal a heartbreaking picture. The reader first meets Jane Ashland as she lies on her back in an icy Norwegian mist, contemplating the prospect of freezing to death. The story then leaps to her flight to Norway from her home in Wisconsin, during which she meets an attractive, self-assured, and occasionally irritating zoologist named Ulf, who studies musk oxen. Bit by bit, the reader is introduced to Jane’s uncommunicative parents, her enthusiastic psychiatrist, and the events that have led her to flee Wisconsin, where she has a disastrous encounter with some distant relatives and takes off into the wilderness with Ulf. The excitement of the first pages of the novel wears off as the shape of a predictable narrative emerges from the initial flurry of hints and clues. Even so, Houm maintains the momentum of the spare novel, in which new mysteries constantly emerge as old ones are resolved. Not so much a conventional thriller as a psychological study of the reverberations of trauma, its impact deepens even as its suspense lessens, resulting in a winning novel.