Deanna Northrup // Reviews

Email this article

Missing Mom: Joyce Carol Oates

Oates, Joyce Carol. Missing Mom. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. 464 pp.

 I knew from Joyce Carol Oates’ author commentary that this novel was written in response to her own mother’s death, and since the name of the book is Missing Mom, I expected the mother’s death to come early, yet I was surprised when it did. It was sudden and unexpected and senseless, as murder generally is. And it was breathtakingly well-wrought, as Oates’ violent scenes generally are.

After the death scene and the immediate aftermath, it seemed there was little left to say and so I wondered how so much book could be left, but Oates never fails to fill her pages with substance. There was, indeed, much left to say about how the two daughters dealt with their personal and public problems in the year after Gwen’s murder.

As the murderer’s trial is postponed again and again, the youngest daughter and first person protagonist, Nikki, who habitually runs from committed relationships even as she longs for one, gradually drifts out of her relationship with a married man. Meanwhile, the seemingly ideal marriage of the older sister, Clare, is falling apart as she self-destructs.

Though she has been distancing herself from her mother for ten years, Nikki is compelled now to draw close to Gwen, moving into her empty house, assuming her charitable duties, and squeezing Gwen’s friends for information about her early life. This investigation of her mother’s life yields many insights into Nikki’s own life, leaving her a better person, finally willing to take a chance on a committed relationship.

Oates’ recurring theme of longing is present but much subdued, especially compared to her early work, which often had longing manifested in ravenous hunger. Here, Nikki’s longing is illustrated by her listening “obsessively” to the radio station for which her married lover works and baking bread with all her mother’s recipes. In this book, the only character for which the hunger metaphor is used is Clare’s perplexed husband Rob, who, after Clare leaves him, stares at Nikki “with glistening-hungry eyes” and a “hurt-hungry mouth.” But even without the kind of extended hunger metaphor Oates used in them and Wonderland, the longing comes through loud and clear, in Nikki’s intense need to step into her dead mother’s life, as though in penance for her shortcomings as a daughter.

It might be unnecessary to mention the title’s double (perhaps triple) entendre. Missing Mom sounds like a book about a mother who goes missing (kidnapped, runs away, somehow disappears), and perhaps the search for her. Mom, in this case, is not missing, but there is certainly a search for her. Missing, in this case, is of course the progressive verb for “longing for, regretting the absence of.” But certainly we should also recognize the past-tense component as equally important to the angst of the novel. Nikki realizes she missed knowing Gwen when she was alive, and risks missing out on her own life if she doesn’t change her ways. In the conclusion of the novel there is evidence that Nikki has changed, as she begins what seems to be a committed relationship. What she has learned about her missing mom promises to capacitate a happier life for Nikki.

Deanna Northrup conducts Creative Writing Workshops and will soon be teaching English Composition at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. In addition to book reviews, she writes short stories and literary essays and is at work on her second novel.

Date of Publication: 25 Feb 2008