Last Seen Leaving
Issue #30
Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $23
By Kate Rockwood
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Even readers who relished Kelly Braffet’s deliciously gothic debut, Josie and Jack, will have a hard time pushing through her second novel, Last Seen Leaving. It’s an inoffensive but non-compelling read in which the main question of suspense is whether the story will transcend the usual formalities of a mystery-thriller and plumb the complexities of the characters.
Josie and Jack depicted the suffocating intimate relationship between a pair of isolated siblings in a decrepit mansion overflowing with dusty curios. If Braffet’s first novel is a story about too-close connections, Last Seen Leaving is a novel about absence, disappearances, and emotional voids created by being left behind.
The story begins when Miranda disappears after her car is totaled in an accident, and she hitches a ride with a stranger to an anonymous Virginia town, having chosen to leave her previous life behind on a whim. But the man who drove Miranda from her car crash to her new life keeps reappearing unexpectedly. And as the plot thickens, it becomes troublingly apparent that he may be more sinister than initially thought.
As her mother, Anne, flounders in her search for Miranda, and the narrative switches between the two women. The pages turn more quickly when the narrative is on Miranda, an ex–Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing badass who dabbles in dangerous behavior, rather than on her tentative mother, who’s interested in New Age mysticism and mainly plays a waiting game. In many ways, Miranda’s disappearance echoes the disappearance of her father, Nick, who mysteriously vanished decades ago while flying a top-secret mission in Central America. Both women feel Nick’s absence as the chasm that separates them from their previous happiness.
Where Braffet struggles is in overemphasizing Nick’s absence as the convenient defining malaise for both mother and daughter, who gradually disconnect from each other and from themselves. The flashbacks, which show the only times both women interact, are another way to rehash the overarching significance of Nick’s disappearance rather than revealing further character insight. When Anne learns of her husband’s death only moments before her 8-year-old daughter brings her a nearly dead kitten whose mother has been killed along the side of the road, we can’t help but feel manipulated (and not quite successfully at that).
Absent from this novel are the very skills that Braffet has plied so well elsewhere: subtle symbolism, deft imagery, and the ability to portray an intoxicating intimacy within a vivid, nuanced world. Last Seen Leaving is an otherwise fair read made uniquely more disappointing given the high hopes with which we approach this talented author’s sophomore effort.
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