Book Review: The Art of Vanishing

[osprey_archer]

Laura Smith's The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust, a new biography of Barbara Newhall Follett, literally dropped into my hands yesterday at the library, so of course I had no choice but to take it home and read it.

It's an intensely readable book: I got home at nine and stayed up till midnight reading straight through to the finish. The parts about Barbara are good, and Smith has found some impressive new material: one lead that she chases after Barbara's disappearance is a particular tour de force of detective work, even though it ultimately doesn't end anywhere.

(Capsule summary of Barbara's life: her first book, The House Without Windows, was published when she was eleven. It's a story about a little girl named Eepersip who runs away to live in the woods and eventually, at the end of the story, disappears into thin air to become a wood nymph. Fourteen years later, Barbara herself walked out of her apartment and disappeared without a trace.)

Unfortunately, Smith either doesn't have enough material about Barbara to write a whole book - or doesn't go into enough depth with the material she has. The latter seems more likely, given that amount of written material that the entire Newhall family produced. Barbara herself wrote three books (only two were published) and scads of letters; her parents wrote many articles about Barbara's education (they homeschooled their precocious daughter) and also each wrote a book. Her mother's memoir is about an ocean voyage she and Barbara took together after Barbara's father abandoned the family, while her father's novel is in many ways a self-justification for his serial abandonments. He had already abandoned one daughter by a previous marriage when he had Barbara, and he ended up abandoning the woman he left Barbara's mother for, as well.

However, only half of The Art of Vanishing focuses on Barbara. The other half is about Smith's own life: her own struggles with wanderlust, and the fact that this eventually led her to convince her husband that they should experiment with open marriage.

Now, if they had both been enthusiastic about this open marriage idea, it could have worked, but it's pretty clear that Smith is the only one who wanted it. It takes her weeks to talk her husband into it, and she essentially ends up trapping him into agreeing by cheerily giving him her blessing to sleep with other people right before she heads off for a month-long journalism retreat - which puts him into a position where he has to reciprocate, or be cast as the selfish partner who doesn't love her enough to let her be free.

Basically she wears him down into giving his verbal consent for her to sleep with other people, even though it's clear he's not emotionally okay with it, and then is shocked, shocked! when she sleeps with someone else and... her husband is not emotionally okay with it.

There's also a bizarre passage where she muses that maybe Barbara's father wasn't such a bad guy after all, and you know, it's not that I admire her behavior, but maneuvering her husband into an open relationship he doesn't want and thinking about leaving him but ultimately staying is just not in the same league as abandoning three separate families for a cumulative total of six abandoned children.

Comments

[kore]

...oh dear, I think I had heard about this story via a magazine article, but the book sounds like one of those awful hybrids where it's half about an interesting subject and half about the dull author. (There was a terrible one like this about Doris Lessing recently.)

[osprey_archer]

To give this book its due, while I was actually reading it I didn't find the parts about the author dull. It was only when it was over and I was thinking back over it that I was like "But we could have had way more Barbara Newhall Follett though?"

[evelyn_b]

Wow, the vanishing author story sounds fascinating, but words cannot express how uninterested I am in a nonfiction account of some author bullying her husband into an open marriage and musing about it.

(I might read a novel about that character, but make it a real person and I'm out).

[osprey_archer]

There's an older book written by Barbara's mother (and I believe a coauthor) which is All Barbara, All the Time, so if you want more about that story and less about "But what if we had an open marriage, honey? What then?", that's an option.

I wouldn't say the author bullied her husband exactly; it's more like that group dynamic where one person really, really wants to do something - get Thai food or watch Doctor Who or whatever - and no one else really wants to but eventually they do it just to shut that person up.

Only the consequences of agreeing to have Thai for dinner are way smaller than saying "okay FINE we can give the open marriage thing a try."

[evelyn_b]

Hah, fair enough. I shouldn't judge before I read. . . and in this case I probably won't read, so judgment retracted.

(outside my head, at least)

[asakiyume]

Ugh, I have a gut reaction of dislike for this woman, but apart from that, I really don't like these books which are half [topic] and half "and this book is also about me and my life." I don't mind a little authorial presence, but if I want to read about Barbara Newhall Follett, then that's who I want to read about--not this woman who browbeat her husband into agreeing to an open marriage.

What's the interesting new information? (It's not the foul play theory, right? It seems like we've both read about that before.)

[osprey_archer]

These half-and-half books have become very popular in recent years, and I get why authors like them (half the research!) but I don't get why publishers have gone along with the trend.

The interesting new information is that it occurs to her that Barbara might have gone to meet a former boyfriend, a sailor from her South Seas voyage, so she goes to the herculean effort of tracking him down with just his common last name (Anderson) and a nickname (Ed, which could be a lot of different first names). But she does find him in the end, with the help of a PI, and discovers that he died two years before Barbara disappeared. So it doesn't ultimately lead anywhere, but it could have been a good lead to follow: Barbara's husband was leaving her for another woman, so it seemed quite possible that she might go back to an old love.

[asakiyume]

How very her-mystery that after all that, the lead goes nowhere! But how tenacious of the author to have chased it down, all the same. It **might** have been very fruitful.