My first Amazon review: M_SS_NG G_RL and the make-believe literary cabal

It takes a lot of chutzpah (or hubris) to undertake a project like the one described in Messas’s book. Messas staged her own disappearance from some unnamed artists’ colony two years ago (simply by not returning when she was expected—no fake ransom notes or overturned chairs), holed herself up in a nearby motel, and chronicled the community’s reactions. Throughout the narrative, Messas positions herself as a victim of a larger cultural response to missing women, rather than embracing her role as mastermind who created authentic distress in a group of well-meaning people.

There are a number of reasons to doubt the veracity of the entire project. How, in this age, does one really cover one’s digital tracks or stay anonymous? Messas has implied elsewhere that a legal gag order is in place that prohibits her from identifying the people or places that appear in the book. (She’s also implied that the news station websites might have employed a web-scrubber to erase their own articles on the disappearance, as though they’d be embarrassed by being suckered in, rather than eager to report a newsworthy hoax.) In the book, she maintains that the “mystery of this story does not lie with those details.” I’m no Reddit user, but I’m a child of the internet, and I’ve got no doubt that sooner or later someone’s going to deal with the issue of truth and credibility here.  

Instead, it’s the literary propositions that I seek to question. In the narrative, Messas refers to “the experience of going missing,” implying that there is a single experience that is shared (metaphorically, at least) by the missing women and girls she identifies in a laundry list of books ranging from Jane Eyre to Lady in the Lake to Night Film (which just came out last year). In Messas’s narrative, I read the insinuation of some shared, insidious intent on the part of the writers who make these women go missing (or die)—as though Italo Calvino, Tom Stoppard, and Haruki Murakami are sitting in a smoke-filled room somewhere, a literary cabal intent on systematically erasing vulnerable women from the world by eliminating them from books and short stories. (Norman Mailer, maybe, but surely not Murakami!) It’s unclear to me what Messas’s alternative would be: a world in which certain subjects are just de facto off-limits for writers? If so, is it Messas—a person who freely manipulated the good intentions of an unsuspecting community—who’s going to draw those ethical lines for the rest of us?

There’s something in Messas’s choice of approach here (the conflation of a physical going-missing with the literary going-missings she purports to be exploring) that implies a causal connection between literary disappearances and real-life dangers to women and girls. It’s a connection that I wish she had amplified and clarified. While I don’t think it would have saved her book from critique, further discussion of this issue might allow the book to have an impact outside her tightly closed circuit of thought. Without reaching a tentacle into the real world, Messas is just another unknown writer criticizing more talented or successful writers rather than making something new herself.