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48 CLUES INTO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MY SISTER is classic Joyce Carol Oates, brilliantly written, taut with suspense, eerie, unsettling and inconclusive.
Beautiful, talented artist Marguerite disappears without a trace one fall day. She leaves home to walk to her studio at the upstate New York university where she teaches and is never seen again. The novel's first-person narrator is her younger sister Gigi. Frustrated by the ineptitude of the police investigation, Gigi pursues her own theories about what happened, exploring these and the clues she unearths in the short journal-like entries that comprise the novel. She also, indeed more pertinently, reveals disquieting details about her family (quite a horde of nosy relatives), the too-quiet town where they live, and her own fraught inner life.
Gigi is dramatically less talented, popular and beautiful than Marguerite. Forever in the shadows, she emerges as rapacious in her love for and resentment of the golden girl who disappeared. In her mid-twenties, Gigi is the only remaining child in the family; her mother died years earlier. She now lives alone in the big rambling family home with her father, who is utterly bereft at the loss of his adored daughter. Marguerite occupied a suite of rooms with gorgeous views. Gigi has a single room across the hall. Gigi is clever, stubborn, not terribly likeable, and tormented by unexpressed yearnings.
Gigi suggests a variety of possible explanations for her sister's disappearance. There were men in her life, some of whom, at least, thought they had relationships with her. She came back to her small hometown apparently to care for Gigi when their mother died, giving up shining opportunities as a New York artist to do so. A slinky silk Dior dress on her floor implies … that maybe she had a series of secret and even tawdry sexual liaisons?
What actually happened to Marguerite? Readers must draw their own conclusions. The more Gigi writes, the less reliable she seems as a narrator. She has so much invested, and so many complicated and powerful emotions that one suspects her perceptions are coloured. It is possible that Marguerite chose to disappear, in order to get away from the dull burdens of her life. It is also possible that foul play was involved; some passages suggest exactly what may have happened, while others seem to contradict them.
If it sounds as though Oates has copped out, nothing could be further from the truth. The book is, however, hardly a straightforward whodunnit. It is something far more interesting: a deeply insightful and chilling psychological exploration. 48 CLUES INTO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MY SISTER is absorbing, fascinating and disturbing in precisely the way a riveting thriller should be. Not to be missed.
§ Meg Westley is a writer and retired educator living in Stratford, Ontario.
Reviewed by Meg Westley, March 2023
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