REVIEW: "How Quickly She Disappears" by Raymond Fleischmann
As I prepared to graduate from college some 15 years ago, I attended a job fair.
Though my earned teaching license was not even in my hot little hands yet, I was eager to find a job that would allow me to put to work the skills I had spent four years cultivating.
As I circulated, overwhelmed by both the number of districts seeking teachers and the number of newly prepared candidates eager to fill those positions, I came across a school from Alaska.
Intrigued, I stopped and learned that they were seeking young teachers to temporarily fill hard to fill positions — those in far-flung reaches where resources were scarce and qualified candidates even scarcer.
I remember, at the time, thinking how fascinating it would be. Romantic, even, with the fur-lined jackets and the abundant snow and the ethereal northern lights.
Though I never did take that job — landlocked in Ohio as I was by my fiance who still had another year of school — I periodically think about how fantastical that adventure might have been.
But now, I suspect, I will no longer think of Alaska as a magical and, more importantly, desirable place to live. After reading How Quickly She Disappears, the first novel by Raymond Fleischmann, I have been entirely disabused of that notion.
Though the protagonist of this novel, Elisabeth, grew up in Pennsylvania, she has, for quite some time, lived with her daughter and husband in Tanacross, a remote Alaskan village.
During her childhood, Elisabeth might have enjoyed many of the modern(ish) amenities she now lacks, but that doesn’t mean these formative years were entirely without issue. Most notably traumatic was the disappearance of her twin sister, Jacqueline, when Elisabeth was a pre-teen.
Given that it’s been twenty years since her sister’s disappearance, the logical consensus is that Jacqueline is dead. But Elisabeth knows that can’t be the case. She would, she believes, feel it in her bones if her sister — the other half of her — were dead.
While Elisabeth will never forget her long-missing sister, this disappearance isn’t something that is usually at the forefront of her mind.
That all changes when, in place of their usual mail carrier, a German man touches down on the Tanacross landing strip. Albert, as Elisabeth quickly learns he is called, isn’t in the village long before disaster strikes — or, more specifically, he instigates disaster.
Late one night, purportedly in an argument about cards, Albert kills a man.
Perplexing, following this murder, he is only willing to speak to one person: Elisabeth.
When Elisabeth goes to speak to Albert, he shares news that completely upends any order she has managed to build into her life. He knows what happened to Jacqueline, he tells her. And, if she is willing to play his game, he’ll take Elisabeth to her sister.
Though Elisabeth knows that she shouldn’t trust Albert — who literally still has blood on his hands — the promise of finally finding her sister proves too enticing a temptation to resist. So she goes along with him, willingly participating in a warped game of cat and mouse that threatens everything she holds dear.
From page one, Fleischmann’s writing was engrossing. His prose lyrical and his descriptions sensory-rich, he absolutely built a world that transported his readers not just geographically to often inhospitable Alaska, but also back in time, to the 1940s, when the lack of modern amenities in many parts of the state made inhabiting these reaches even more of a daunting task.
Not only did this distinctive setting make the story feel more rich and exotic, but also it increased the seriousness of the peril in which our protagonist found herself. This extreme tension leaves readers feeling like they have little choice but to continue to read, bedtime be damned.
Another clear strength of Fleischmann’s novel was its multidimensionality.
It was a novel about a disappearance, but it wasn’t just that.
It was a novel about living in Alaska, but it wasn’t just that.
It was a novel about a marriage on the brink, but it wasn’t just that.
It was rich and vivid and intense in all the right ways.
Though I would like to say that I found no issue with the novel as a whole — which is something I rarely have the pleasure of doing — I will, sadly, not quite be able to say that, here.
Ultimately, I had two small issues.
First, as the book neared the end, there were two scenes — flashbacks, specifically — that I found... cringy.
And, the thing is, I can handle cringy... if it's for a reason.
But these two scenes — and you'll know exactly which ones I’m talking about when you read the novel — were just as shocking as they were completely out of the blue.
They seemed to me to simply be provocative for the sake of being provocative, not for the sake of advancing the story.
And, as such, in my opinion, it would have been better had they not been there.
My second concern is a bit more significant than the admittedly nitpicky issue I took with a few scenes.
Though I was almost impossibly eager to reach the conclusion of this novel and, in doing so, find out what had happened to Jacqueline twenty years prior, when I finally did uncover the truth I found it… underwhelming. Perhaps as a result of the strength of the writing as a whole, I had high expectations for the resolution, and they simply weren’t met.
These issues notwithstanding, the tension that filled most of this novel was so taut, and the atmosphere so engulfing, that I would still recommend it without hesitation.
It earns 4 out of 5 cocktails.
Would you ever want to live in Alaska? Tell me what you think in the comments, below.
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