It’s fascinating work, but lately, something else is pulling me back to my computer late at night. I get carried away in such guilty pleasure that if my husband walks in unexpectedly, I’m prone to click off my screen as if hiding an online affair, or a gaming addiction.
But it’s neither. I’m writing poetry. I hadn’t realized how badly I’ve missed language, the weight of words, their rhythms and tastes on the tongue. Oh, I love telling a story: beginning, middle, end. But there’s delight in telling a moment: the world turned over by a sudden encounter of unacquainted thoughts.
There are an endless number of ways investigators do this, but Rambam says most of his snoops begin the same way: By going to the last place the person was seen alive and picking up the trail from there. “We start with the last known address, the last known location they were and the last known associates they were with,” he explains. “This is one of the few times where fiction and real life are the same.”
When the last place a person was seen alive was a body of water and their remains don’t turn up within a few weeks of their disappearance, Rambam says pseudocide immediately becomes a consideration (that’s also when insurance companies and other clients start blowing up his phone). If he looks into it further and finds out that the person who vanished in that water was in serious debt or that they were “some kind of reluctant witness or litigant who has the resources to disappear in a puff of smoke,” he says it’s “just the most obvious thing. We see it all the time.”
It’s hard not to hear authorial anxiety in the question, and there is pathos in Crain’s awareness of the quixotic nature of his project—and of the fact that, considered in conventional terms, it might well be judged irrelevant. Viewed ungenerously, the unconvincing plot elements of cyberespionage and comic-book telepathy might seem a claim to fashionable relevance made on behalf of this decidedly unfashionable book. But, at its best, the novel makes a more difficult, more convincing claim, one I was grateful for in an age obsessed with subject matter: that, in the sharpening of our senses and accoutrement of our sensibilities, the more profound relevance of literature lies in form.
Steinberg’s latest novel is a text that if you only read it once, you feel like you’ve missed everything important… but you do realize just how important it is, so you must turn back to page one immediately before it’s too late. Before the girls let another boy touch them; before the fathers say another harsh word to their daughters, before the girl jumps into the dark and turbulent water below; because you know she cannot be saved, but the only thing that will keep her alive is to keep reading.