Big Fiction: Last Seen Leaving by Kelly Braffet

Kelly Braffet’s Last Outing (2006)

Something that never ceases to amaze me about TV shows like Cold Case Files Y forensic files it’s how so often, for incredibly long periods of time, horrific crimes go unsolved. Most people are familiar with the Black Dahlia case, perhaps the most famous unsolved murder of all. Modernism took a long time to catch up with fiction, until about twenty or thirty years ago, in the literary genres of mystery and thriller, cases like the Dahlia never appeared. Even in crime fiction that works as serious literature, like Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels, all loose ends are tied up, all dots and t’s crossed at the end of the book. We seek closure and resolution, and we tend to feel frustrated if we don’t get it. In Last seen leaving Kelly Braffet offers us a story of murders and disappearances that leaves us hanging like an unsolved file. In an interview with Scott Snyder around the time this novel came out, Braffet discussed her view of secrets and the ultimate inability to understand another person’s motives and behavior.

He also spices up his novel with a rather original mix of philosophy and avant-garde observance of contemporary young adult culture, of questionable areas of foreign policy and parent-child relationships, and of the magnetic appeal that the possibility of danger and harm seems to have for some people. She is as comfortable with Nietzsche and Heidegger as she is with video games and lipstick.

Speaking of Nietzsche, one of the main philosophical concepts that scholars and researchers have always associated with him is that of Nihilism- a word that seems to have different meanings depending on which thinker we are using it with in context. Nietzsche was a metaphysical nihilist who believed that ultimately, in the final analysis, life was completely meaningless and that in our attempts to understand it we simply throw psychological projections onto the blank canvas of the universe. The scientist presents science as the Ultimate Truth, the artist presents art as the Ultimate Truth, the religious person presents religion as the Ultimate Truth: all these are simply defense mechanisms that human beings invent to try to defeat nihilism. Last seen leaving We examine this point sharply, in a passage where we meet a character named Seth, a beach bum, and philosophize:

In Seth’s real life, the non-summer part that had nothing to do with waiting tables or wiping the sand off his sheets so he could get into bed with her, he was a grad student who read thick books with small print and nothing to do. characters. He taught eighteen year olds about Heidegger and Nietzsche. He ate sushi, went skiing in Vermont, and was writing a dissertation on Being and Time.He didn’t think any of the girls he met in that life had dragons tattooed around their navels.

The “she” having these thoughts is Miranda Cassidy, one of the two main characters in the book (the other being her mother, Anne); The point is that a true Nietzschean—perhaps Seth is, since he seems to truly savor all experiences—would not compartmentalize his life into this life and that life, real life and beach life, work life and house life. game etc. . – your life is simply an integrated thing, not something that you can cut into sections like a piece of fruit. Thus, Miranda is a representative of a different kind of nihilism, what is often called Russian nihilism, a belief system in which the young despise the beliefs, values, and attitudes of their elders. This is pointed out in a later second passage about Miranda and some of her friends:

“They think of themselves as creatures of the world, tough and brutal and unflinching. They listen to dark and angry music, they watch dark and angry movies, they collect dark and angry comic books. They read Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick and Mervyn Peake The modern world, for them, is nothing more than a pale imitation of the dystopian universes they read about…

So they wait. Meanwhile, they jealously guard their disappointment and their traps, because for them, either you understand it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you better not do it. Their disappointment is the only thing they are sure of, and they don’t want it to be used lightly.”

You might ask, what are these kids so disappointed in? The answer is the same as the answer to quite a few key questions the book raises: we don’t know. In a way, Braffet follows the kind of strategy used by Paul Auster in the novel glass city – a crime story, a mystery, which is unsolved and unsolved, all questions and no answers. In another way, however, it opens up an equally mysterious avenue of plot and character that depends, for its effect, precisely on our knowledge of the mystery: CIA covert operations in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. As I read the novel de Braffet, I felt somewhat fortunate to have been familiar with an important American novel about the CIA in Latin America from the 1980s, the novel by Robert Stone. a flag for dawn, as well as Tina Rosenberg’s 1991 non-fiction account Children of Cain: violence and the violent in Latin America, which helped me appreciate Braffet’s work much more. Braffet is excellent at just skimming the horrors that lie beneath the mouth of the volcano. This methodology is attractive to us as readers because we know that the author knows much more than she says, that her knowledge of such things is strong enough to allow her to write about them in a minimalist way with confidence and plausibility.

Anne Cassidy is a middle-aged mother living in Arizona who moved there from the Pittsburgh area years ago when her husband Nick, a pilot employed by an enigmatic and shadowy company called Western Mountain, crashes their plane while flying in a mission over Central America. and she never heard from him again. (Significantly, wreckage of the aircraft is never found.) Her rebellious daughter, Miranda, originally accompanies her west, but she returns to Pennsylvania as soon as she is old enough to live on her own. There, she disappears one night after crashing her car, being picked up on the road by a passer-by named George who takes an uncharacteristic interest in her. She takes a ride with him and somehow ends up in a coastal town in Virginia.

Meanwhile, Anne, after not speaking to her daughter for many months, begins to get frantic when her many calls to Miranda are not returned. The sense of fear and threat is heightened several levels by the unintentionally mocking greeting on Miranda’s answering machine: “You know what to do.” Here, this fairly common greeting goes from a simple everyday phrase to a reminder of Anne’s helplessness: she It is not know what to do. After a few days of frantic calls, Miranda’s phone number goes out of order and Anne gets on a plane to go look for her. She finds only dead ends, and a detective named Romansky (a holdover from the detective stories of yesteryear, an impotent Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe; say Romansky’s name very slowly to herself) tells her that her daughter is probably just has moved. there is no foul play involved. Anne won’t have it, and when she is granted access to Miranda’s vacant apartment and she figures out how to listen to her phone messages, she finds a series of messages from a boyfriend named Jay that become increasingly drunk and obnoxious. Naturally, she fears the worst.

Nevertheless, us I know that Miranda is, at least in appearance and for now, fine; after a while, Braffet begins to tell the story in sequences that alternate between Anne’s search for Miranda, Miranda’s slums on the Virginia beach with her slacker friends, and flashbacks showing Anne, Nick, and Miranda as a family in earlier and happier times. But just as there is a high element of angst to Anne’s search for Miranda, there is also one surrounding Miranda and the town of Lawrence Beach: a serial killer has been murdering young ladies in town, their bodies washed on the coast, and there are constant suggestions that George could be the killer. Still later, we see that George has possible connections to Miranda’s long-lost father.

Miranda and Anne are shown to often disagree, argue, misunderstand, frustrate each other, behave differently, and take different perspectives on Nick’s death/disappearance. Braffet points this out in two strikingly contrasting passages that symbolize the differences in the “soul content” of mother and daughter. First, about Miranda:

“When she was driving, she liked to think she was connected to a huge, powerful machine. Like science fiction: the car’s nervous system was linked to hers through the sole of her right foot.”

About Anne (who, by the way, works in a New Age store and is interested in all kinds of New Age spirituality and healing):

“She imagines herself in Sedona, barefoot on red dirt, a mysterious energy humming through the soles of her feet and moving within her, filling her with something pure and real.”

They both channel energy through their feet, which makes them similar, but one channels energy through the throttle of the car, the other through the ground, which makes them different, impossibly different. Your attempts to establish genuine emotional contact are, perhaps, doomed to failure.

This novel has intensely interesting supporting characters, primarily including a fellow pilot of Nick’s named X-ray and a juggler boyfriend of Miranda’s named Rainier, and also makes very sophisticated use of scenes that aren’t really related to the main action but suggest, comment and stand next to him. To take just one example, one morning Anne finds a dead man in her car in the parking lot of the store where she works. She had been a customer the day before, buying a book titled Heal yourself with Chakras. The whole situation is at the same time absurd, ironic, sad, funny in a very dark sense of humor, meditative and sensually captivating (Braffet’s writing is very aurally oriented, with sound tracks), but it works in another way: gives us the closing we long for, but it does so entirely incidentally and therefore does not satisfy at all. It takes some courage to write this way, and Braffet is up to the challenge.

In this novel, mood and atmosphere, in my opinion, take precedence over the desire to write a “story well done” in the Aristotelian sense, and it’s a refreshing approach that more authors should probably try. But that’s not to say that he isn’t successful with traditional storytelling elements like characterization, because he is. And I think a mix of modern and traditional, done well like this, is always welcome.