/nor, New Ohio Review, issue 3

William Gass—fiction writer and philosopher—has always focused on the accumulation of acerbic, image-driven language. Gass’s preface to his 1968 collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, includes his impetus for writing “The Pedersen Kid,” his breakneck novella: “And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache there has to be lots of incident, some excitement, much menace.” Gass employs language as content, and the apparent contemporary inheritor of such an aesthetic is Blake Butler.

“The Disappeared,” published in the current issue of New Ohio Review, also appears to have been written to entertain a toothache. Like “The Pedersen Kid,” Butler’s begins with low-register, Anglo-Saxon prose: “The year they tested us for scoliosis, I took my shirt off in front of the whole gym.” Compare the beginning of Gass’s novella: “Big Hans yelled, so I came out.” By placing the first-person narrator in the second clause of the sentences, both writers begin a narrative precedent for their fiction: although first-person narrators are employed, the profluence of the narratives vacillates between narrator and observed characters, thus pushing the first-person perspective toward omniscience. In his story, Butler employs Gass’s lumbering, taut cadence to blur the boundaries of tangible reality: The unnamed narrator’s father is sent to prison for suspected abuse, but the narrator’s reliability is complicated when he intertwines maternal dreams with anecdotes that teachers “requested my assignments be handed in laminated.” By the end of the story, Butler abandons conventional narrative, and instead exudes the distress of his narrator through syntax.

Although “The Disappeared” begins with a father and son, the absent character of the title–the mother–becomes essential to the story. She is gone, yet the father and son see, feel, and hear flashes of her in a men’s room and on a “tobacco billboard.” The son begins searching everywhere for the lost mother, while society around him becomes consumed with a mysterious disease. The locus of this disease is the boy’s school, where “instead of our usual assignments, we read manuals on how to better keep our bodies clean.” A full-scale quarantine ensues but ultimately the narrator returns to his initial pain: his missing mother.

The disease that debilitates the community mirrors how traumatic the disappearance of the mother would be for the young narrator, but the structure of Butler’s narrative belies conventional metaphor: In “The Disappeared” and other fictions, Butler eschews any reasonable teleology. Instead, he creates a world comprised of feelings and imagery, where reason and unreason are afforded equal stature. This aesthetic is a direct result of his focus on rhythm and construction, and in this way he again resembles Gass, particularly the conclusion of “The Pedersen Kid.” Gass’s novella centers on the appearance of the Pedersen kid: a child found near-frozen. The narrator, Jorge, observes and participates in the ensuing burlesque, with his mother pouring whiskey down the kid’s throat and the father cursing the absent Pedersen. When the father, Jorge, and Hans, a farmhand, head into the snow to search for the child’s father, the narrative splinters with flashbacks, half-truths, and rambles circumventing reality. The final scenes of the novella become obtuse, but only if the reader requires a clear conclusion: Jorge is alone in the Pedersen’s house. His father and Hans “disappear[ed] like the Pedersens had.” Jorge may be responsible for their demise, or it may merely be the storm. The cumulative result is of despair and hatred for the frozen boy that caused the hunt.

“The Disappeared” implodes as it careens toward a powerful conclusion. With the community dying around him, the narrator studies a map, created by his father, which documents the search for the mother. The boy escapes the disease that surrounds him and returns to his father’s frantic hunt: “I thought of the day he’d punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she’d be tucked away there inside. All those places he’d looked and never found her. Inside their mattress. In stained glass windows.” Because Butler employs a rigidity in sentence structure through a large portion of the story, he earns the sentiment of the conclusion. After the father tears up the carpet and floor, they discover concrete and dirt, and, finally, water, where “I swam down . . . with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn’t see a thing.” By threading palpable imagery through irrational events, Butler creates an idiosyncratic, original story, with permanence beyond the play of language.