Sam Simoneaux returns to New Orleans after fighting in France. Glad to have survived the First World War he is keen to start afresh with his wife and happily settles into life working in a department store. But when a child is abducted on his watch and he loses his job in the process; he feels his only way back is to find this child. So, he takes a job on the Mississippi steamboat that the child’ parents work as musicians, hoping to find the clues to her whereabouts. And as he slowly makes his journey down the river, he comes to terms with his own past, filled with loss and a need for revenge.
Gautreaux writes with such eloquence and brings the Mississippi river to life and captures the flavour of the time. There are some beautiful turns of phrase, for instance ‘in the cold open country their laughter sounded like ice breaking’ or describing a woman ‘her red face rising angrily as a boil out of a white feather boa’. These almost poetic touches are scattered throughout and bring a little light relief to a gritty story about the hardships men, like Sam had to face, returning home from war and trying to make ends meet for their families.
Sam is a character that the reader can relate to, basically a decent man who has made mistakes along the way, a man with flaws but it trying to do the best he can. The novel charts his personal journey into acknowledging the death of his family, which he had spent a lifetime avoiding. I empathised with the character, life seemed to be constantly throwing him hurdles and yet he didn’t give up.
The novel takes an unexpected turn regarding the abducted child, and what should be a resolution seems only to bring more problems for Sam. Yet, this is theme that runs throughout the novel, of the many paths life can take us, that perhaps fate has something else in store for us that what we had planned.
The Missing is not necessary a book I would have normally picked up, yet I’m glad I did, if only to be introduced to the writing of Gauteaux, as well as an excellent storyteller, his prose bought to life a bit of America’s history and a past that I was unaware of.