Mothers and Sons

Jaimee Wriston Colbert's third novel, Vanishing Acts, is a fragmented mother and son story which focuses on Gwen Johnson's runaway child, Buddy Johnson. The novel is set in Hawaii, and our prologue opens with Jody Johnson vanishing into the sea with his surfboard, meeting a tragic end and leaving Gwen's mother, Madge Johnson, to raise their daughter on her own.

Flash forward to Gwen's son, Buddy. In a sexually charged, high school adolescence fervor, Buddy and his aspiring model girlfriend, Marnie, jump on a plane and island hop. They are running away from home, and Marnie. Meanwhile, Gwen slides into alcoholism while tending to her dying mother, whose memories, humanity, and sense of time are deteriorating.

Colbert's theme in this book is disappearances. The topic is well covered—mostly at the expense of plot and character development. Houdini, pickpockets, vanishing surfers, ghosts, and quantum physics all take up large sections of this three-hundred page experimental novel. Drugs and dreams are common in the lives of both Buddy and Gwen. This way, the author builds a slippery relationship with what's real, and what's not. But, the main culprit the novel's elusiveness is a very active, omniscient, narrator who frequently speaks in the present tense, and gives large portions of the book the feeling of a dictated hallucination.

At one point the narrator implores, "There's order to this madness." And, occasionally, there is. The narrator's voice is used to purpose. However, there are many sections when this voice has an extremely tin ear. For example, this voice often speaks rhetorically: "The upshot? He's screwed," which is followed in a new paragraph by, "Here's how that goes: …" Rhetorical questions like, "The way it played out?" abound. This tactic is patronizing. Colbert is essentially asking the question that the reader should be asking themselves. It's a shortcut to advancing the action. It's telling instead of showing. Ideally, when Colbert's narrator asks, "Does Buddy have a home?" the reader would have been keeping score, and was wondering the same thing themselves.

The third person narrator with a little personality can be a powerful tool, but it becomes overkill when we add in all the other experimental flourishes Colbert deploys. Between moving back and forth between the present and the late 1960s, the fragmented points of view, and a wide cast of characters to keep track of, Colbert keeps the reader at a considerable distance with few payoffs to keep the momentum going.

Albeit, there is a plan. This book is meant to reward the very diligent reader. Vanishing Acts is a riddle, but the characters along the way also make it difficult to care about the answer.

Gwen, Buddy's mother, is the relatable one. Gwen is concerned for her son and the cruelty of the world. She's the voice of reason in chaos, while Buddy, on the other hand, has two chaotic desires—one local and one macro. In the grand scheme, he wants to obsessively study insects. When our narrator is speaking Buddy's thoughts, there are some beautiful, information rich, side mentions of beetles, and spiders, and Hawaiian entomological bits. On a local teenage boy level, Buddy desperately wants to make love to his girlfriend, and thus they can become a real couple. We spend a too-long first act of the book dwelling on Buddy's pining for Marnie who refuses to have sex with him.

The book revolves primarily around Buddy and this runaway girlfriend. We all know that Buddy is on a sexually quixotic quest to have sex with Marnie. We know this because Marnie is drawn as a cruel and narcissistic young woman. Marnie uses her body to get around the rules. The first time we meet her, she is showing her cleavage to a police officer in order to get out of a ticket. A little later, this is an example of how she talks to Buddy, "'Whatever. Like you're lost in...