Losing a 15 year old, who by all accounts is the light of ones life, is not a story that can be made palatable by any measure. So I knew to expect to be uncomfortable going in. And I did. I felt the same discomfort any other parent would feel reading a story like this. Contrary to crime thriller conventions though, there were no twists. There was nothing to redeem the fact that in the very first 30 pages we already know that the math tutor has something to do with Ellie’s disappearance. What follows in the next 300+ pages is just the how of it.
I first heard of the book called the ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ in this episode of Everything is Everything. Irrespective of which plot a book follows, there is something common to all seven plots – the protagonist is doing something, going somewhere, experiencing a transformation. It took me a while to understand that this is why the book was so underwhelming to me. There was no mystery to solve and there was no character I could root for – no one with dogged determination deciphering what happened and how. While I felt deeply for the characters – for Laurel and Ellie, I couldn’t root for them because perhaps they were not doing anything to change the situation they found themselves in – so there really wasn’t anything to root for.
From the beginning, Laurel Mack is clearly shown to be a glass-half-empty person – someone who on the best of days could find something to complain about. Does that pessimism ever really go away? Does that pessimism lead to inaction? Does that pessimism quietly seep in from one generation to the next leading to a 15 year old cuffed in a basement – subdued by drugs and sharp words and one incidence of cited violence? In the book, Jewell describes one attempt by Ellie at overpowering Noelle, followed by a desperate resignment to her imprisonment. Even on occasion when Noelle comes in drunk to the basement, Ellie finds herself unable to act. The chapters from Ellie’s perspective are colored more by regret and thoughts on what went wrong in the past than on the here and now. I cannot imagine and the book makes no mention of the immensity of a fifteen year old experiencing a pregnancy and birth.
When Laurel Mack did decide to move on, she does so by changing her hairstyle and shortly afterwards getting into a relationship with a man who oddly reminds her of her husband and whose daughter is eerily similar to her own lost daughter. Determined to not let the last ten years affect her present, she willfully ignores a lot of what seems odd to her. This inaction is far from an inconsistency in her character though. She makes several discoveries but does not act on the discoveries, once again, waiting for life to happen to her. At the end, even the conclusion of the book was authored by Floyd through his video confession. Perhaps the one twist to the book was that Floyd was not as twisted a character as he was initially set up as.
This book is written primarily from Laurel’s perspective. There are chapters from Ellie’s perspective in third person narrative and the only first person narratives are that of Floyd and Noelle. Given this structure, what goes unseen is all that is unseen by Laurel as the story unfolds. As characters in a book, I judged both Ellie and Laurel very harshly for their passiveness and pessimism. Because that doesn’t make for a good story, does it? But in real life – I do not think this is so inconceivable, to be honest. And unless one is in a situation where they feel their very life is threatened – I don’t think any of us really knows what one is capable of.
In the end, for me, both the protagonists and the antagonists in this book were of an impassive variety – driven by inaction more than anything else. In real life, I’d have never questioned as to why didn’t the victim try to free herself. But perhaps, of my book victims, I demand more.