Scenes From a Mall: Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘What Was Lost’

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The New York Sun

In the children’s classic, “The Velveteen Rabbit,” it’s a child who makes a toy real. But in stories for grown-ups, the truth is the reverse: It’s the toy that makes the child real. With its intimations of sweetness and vulnerability, of an imagination unfettered, a toy beloved of a young character in a book (or a movie, or a play) instantly imbues that child with poignancy.

In Catherine O’Flynn’s “What Was Lost” (Holt Paperbacks, 246 pages, $14), the toy in question is a small stuffed monkey named Mickey, dressed in “a pin-striped gangster suit with spats” and customarily seen riding around in the canvas bag of a precocious little girl named Kate. The year is 1984, the place is Birmingham, England, and the mood is loneliness mixed with whimsy.

“You’re ten and you’re a little hive of industry, always running about, always with some project or scheme, always with stuff to do,” Kate’s 22-year-old friend, Adrian, something of an older-brother substitute, tells her. “You make the adults look dead.”

Kate’s main scheme at present is staking out suspects for her detective agency, though she doesn’t have any actual cases; before she can catch a criminal, she has to discover a crime. On the weekends and after school, she rides the bus to her favorite stakeout site, the Green Oaks mall that’s sprung up in the city’s newly extinct industrial zone, where a factory used to be. There she watches and waits, taking earnest, detailed notes about any activity that strikes her as peculiar (“Man seen eating orange peel from brown paper bag”), conferring with Mickey, and putting herself in more danger than she means to.

Aside from Adrian, who’s unaware of the peril, there’s not much of anyone to look out for Kate: Her mother left when she was tiny, her doting father died of a stroke, and the grandmother who lives with her can’t be bothered. So when she goes missing, the public alarm fades quickly. “The girl didn’t come from a normal family; she wasn’t quite right for a tabloid crusade.”

Sharp, funny, and suffused with quiet sadness, “What Was Lost” is a ghost story, and when the novel flashes forward to 2003, Kate’s disappearance still haunts some of those she left behind. In the case of Kurt, a too-bright-for-his-job security guard at Green Oaks, the little girl’s ghostliness is literal: He spots her on a security monitor in the wee hours of Boxing Day, standing watch outside the banks, Mickey riding shotgun. Fearing for this solitary child, who swiftly vanishes, Kurt attempts in vain to track her down, but he can’t find her, and when he calls the police, he can’t find anyone who seems to have lost her.

After Lisa, the overqualified assistant manager of a music superstore in the mall, spies Mickey hidden behind a ventilation pipe, Kurt recognizes the toy, and he and Lisa set out to search for the child together.

Both Kurt and Lisa are about the age Kate would be, had she grown up, and each of them has become the inert species of adult Adrian described. Having failed almost utterly to fulfill whatever promise they had as children, they’re not so much dead as sleepwalking through life — a habit easy to fall into, given that vast tracts of their lives are spent in the spiritual and aesthetic wasteland that is a shopping mall.

Such is the difficulty in approaching a novel whose prime locale is a mall: The assumption is that airlessness, claustrophobia, and fatigue will prevail for the reader as well. Sidestepping that trap is one of the small miracles that Ms. O’Flynn performs with “What Was Lost,” which won last year’s Costa First Novel Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, and was long-listed for the Booker and Orange prizes. An intuitive storyteller who tosses off scenes of “Office”-style comedy as smoothly and keenly as she anatomizes the aftermath of loss, she breathes not only oxygen but life into a dead zone. (Why the book is coming out in this country in trade paperback rather than hardcover is an interesting question, but it should not be taken as any reflection on its quality.)

Ms. O’Flynn, who grew up in Birmingham, in England’s Midlands, is chronicling in part the changes that occurred there and in the larger culture in the 1980s, when the factories shut down, consumers abandoned urban shopping districts in favor of shopping malls, and security cameras started on their way toward omnipresence.

But that is her backdrop. In the foreground, amid the laugh lines, the beautifully calibrated suspense, and the punch-in-the-gut plot twists, are notions about the watcher and the watched, about lost chances, about the ripple effects of passivity and failures of courage. And this, too: All of that surveillance, and still horrendous acts occur unseen.


The New York Sun

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