What was lost by Catherine OFlynn

Tag : Thin Section Bearing

There’s something about precocious, bookish, lonely girls (Ishould know; I was one) that makes them excellent narrators: arather literary vocabulary, a knack for not being noticed, acompulsion to write things down.

Such qualities come in handy when 10-year-old Kate Meaney embarkson a career as a private detective and establishes FalconInvestigations (the only other employee is a stuffed monkey namedMickey). As WHAT WAS LOST begins, it’s 1984, and we find Katestaking out Green Oaks, her local shopping center, in search ofcrimes and misdemeanors. It soon becomes clear that her pretendgames are combined with real powers of observation. Kate’sdescriptions of neighborhood merchants are funny and poignant (abutcher nobody patronizes much anymore, possibly because he“stood in his shop window, swatting flies against the sidesof meat with a large palette knife”), and she nailselementary school herd behavior. When a new girl, Teresa,transcends all previous definitions of naughtiness, the class isshocked and disoriented, “like a small tribal culture whosecosmology is suddenly torn apart by the arrival of a box ofcornflakes….” Kate also notices that Teresa hasbruises and burns on her arms and legs, and is much smarter thanshe lets on.

This mix of Harriet the Spy- ish sardonic humor and dangerous reality runs through the entirenovel; it soon develops that “what was lost,” inKate’s case, was her father (her mother had already left),who drops dead one day, leaving her to the unsentimental care ofher maternal grandmother, Ivy. Using a book called HOW TO BE ADETECTIVE, a gift from her father, Kate sets herself up as a professionalwatcher, keeping unbearable grief at bay with strict timetables(she allows herself only 10 minutes a day to play with her swivelchair) and systematic record-keeping (her father was a retiredstatistician). She also has a friend, Adrian, a kind, unambitiousman in his 20s whose father runs the local newsagent/candy storeand who treats Kate like an adult. She’s surviving prettywell, considering, when Ivy decides she’s too old to care fora child and resolves --- threatens is a better word --- to send Kate to Redspoon, a local boardingschool with scholarships for bright kids.

Fast forward 19 years. We’re no longer in Kate’s head,but we’re in one of her favorite hangouts, the Green Oaksmall. While watching his screens on the night shift, a youngsecurity guard, Kurt, twice glimpses a little girl clutching a toymonkey (no one else sees her). Meanwhile, Lisa, Adrian’syounger sister, who also works at the mall --- as a beleagueredmanager in a music superstore --- finds a toy monkey stuck behindsome pipes. It turns out that Kate Meaney disappeared two decadesago, apparently vanishing into thin air after a trip to Redspoon totake the entrance exam. Adrian, treated by the police as a primesuspect in the case, absconds shortly thereafter. Are thesesightings supernatural? Is the monkey a clue?

Catherine O’Flynn keeps the reader wondering aboutKate’s fate, but this middle section of the book is less amystery than a grim portrait of the community’s decline,circa 2003 --- lookalike chains stores instead of familiar shopsand shopkeepers; huge, anonymous malls instead of factories whereuseful things are actually made. Kurt and Lisa epitomize theparallel loss of meaningful work, the paralyzing boredom and rageof imaginative people in dead-end service jobs, and theirruminations are both bitterly accurate and darkly funny: “Lisa sat in thewindow of Burger King consuming saturated fat and a large carton ofsugar. …There was something in the air of Green Oaks thatmade everyone crave the complex non-flavors of highly processed,industrially honed calorific content, and Lisa was too tired tofight it today. Some of her colleagues … spent so much moneyon the stuff, she wondered if it wouldn’t be easier for themto be paid with a weekly shot of modified starches and transfats….”

My only quibble is that O’Flynn seems a little too interested in her setting. A native of Birmingham, she knows theterritory well and wanted, I suspect, to make a Big Statement aboutthe post-industrial landscape. So there are digressions, and lotsof them: quasi-sociological descriptions of mall culture and modernanomie that frequently have no direct bearing on the story. Kurtand Lisa’s voices are as captivating and smart, in their way,as Kate’s, but they sometimes feel a bit as if they belong toa different book.

Still, they are marvelous characters. And it is heartening to watchthem meet, make a tentative, touching connection and begin toreconsider Kate’s case, probing their own almost forgottenmemories. When the truth of what happened comes out (with the bookreturning to 1984 for two brief segments), it is a mix ofinnocence, altruism and tragic accident, and it has a sad butlovely symmetry. Often first-time novelists fail with theirendings. O’Flynn doesn’t. WHAT WAS LOST is a real find.