Then Gwen dies, stabbed to death by an intruder in her home.

‘Mother, Missing’ is an odd novel: almost entirely character-led, though not quite ringing true and certainly overlong at 434 pages…yet it’s a tribute to Oates’s writing abilities that it still manages to be very readable. The novel follows Nikki’s life for a year as she – who never really thought of herself as a daughter – comes to terms with the loss of her mother. Although she finds out things she didn’t know before, there aren’t many dramatic turns of events. The murderer is caught early on and there’s no doubt about his identity. The novel has a rather fragmentary feel to it, with individual scenes punctuated by very short, more introspective chapters – a structural device that mirrors how Nikki’s life has come apart. (Oates uses a similar device in her 1986 novel ‘Marya: A Life’, which was also semi-autobiographical.)

There’s no doubt that this is a particularly personal novel for Oates: it’s dedicated to her own mother, who died in 2003 (of natural causes, not murder). The novel has a strangely old-fashioned feel to it. Somehow, the characters’ mindset seems off: the self-denying Gwen seems a product of the Fifties, while Nikki’s “rebelliousness” (which seems to extend to having a punky hairdo and sleeping with a married man – and he’s not even still married, but separated). Oates doesn’t have a particularly acute eye or ear for popular culture – the books her characters would read, the films they’d watch, the music they’d listen to. You can sense her making an effort, but she makes idiomatic slips: in one example, a minor teenaged character’s musical tastes are described as “heavy metal rock”. (It’s “heavy metal” or “heavy rock” or just “metal”, but not all three words.) If ‘Mother, Missing’ had been set in 1974 instead of 2004, it would seem more convincing.

There are good things about ‘Mother, Missing’ – mostly Oates’s prose style which maintains an intensity the events of the novel themselves lack, and there are passages – as in most of her novels and short fiction – like a fever-dream in prose. But it’s a flawed work, and won’t be numbered amongst her best novels. Established fans will certainly want to read it; newcomers should approach with caution and would do best to sample other, better Oates novels first.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.