In literature, film and TV, an absence is felt

The last paragraph of Alice Munro’s luminous short story “Silence” contains two sentences and one great sadness: “She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.”

The story, from Munro’s most recent collection, “Runaway,” is about the devastating power of inexplicable absence, and it joins an increasing number of works from many genres -- literature, film, television -- that confront an unsettling, sometimes even terrifying question: What happens when people simply go away?

Not when they die, because that’s a different species of grief. Death is final. Certain. Absolute.

When people disappear without a trace, they may indeed be dead -- but we don’t know for sure. All we know is that they are suddenly gone, and that they do not, or cannot, return.

That scenario -- the mysterious disappearance that leaves a ragged hole in the world -- fuels recent movies such as “Freedomland” (2006), “Flightplan” (2005), “The Forgotten” (2004) and “Keane” (2004); TV shows such as “Without a Trace” and “Cold Case”; and novels such as “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2005) by Jonathan Safran Foer, “American Purgatorio” (2005) by John Haskell and “The Amateur Marriage” (2004) by Anne Tyler.

Only one of the foregoing -- Foer’s novel -- refers specifically to the terrorist attack against America on Sept. 11, 2001, but that shadow falls ominously over the rest.

We’re living in an anxious age, in a world made fragile and contingent by the specter of organized barbarism, when the death of a loved one no longer seems the worst of all possible fates.

The worst is the emotional limbo brought about by a peculiar vanishing, by the wiping-away of a soul with no warning, leaving no trace. The worst is when a life is not demonstrably over but also not provably ongoing, when a disembodied person becomes the very embodiment of loss.

What America learned from 9/11 -- what other nations already knew, from their own dread acquaintance with terrorism and the anguish left in its wake -- is that people can just disappear, can vaporize, can put on a hat and coat and leave in the morning and never come back, can turn a corner and fade from sight forever.

That anxiety, a steady presence in the darkness of our shared fears, finally has tunneled its way up into the daylight of popular culture. And while some of the works in which this theme appears tend to reconcile their plots with less-than-profound trickery -- a negligent parent, a mental illness, a misunderstanding -- the issue of sudden disappearance persists. What underlies it is a frantic desire for the status quo, a desperate yearning for life to return to the way it used to be.

A nostalgia for the normal. For what was -- and what can’t be, ever again, because a loved one’s whereabouts are permanently unknown.

“While I waited for Anne to come walking in through the front door,” Haskell writes in “American Purgatorio,” his curiously alluring novel about a man whose wife vanishes from a gas station while he’s inside buying snacks, “I tried to go about my normal life, to do what I normally would do, but I couldn’t remember what that was.... I sat in what I thought was my old familiar chair, trying to find its familiarity. I sat in a variety of ways -- legs crossed, legs spread, legs up on the arm of the chair -- trying to find the familiar position that would restore my familiar life, so that I could then live it.”

By mimicking the gestures of a former life -- the life before the catastrophe -- we may feel as if we can inhabit that existence again, as if our loved one might be restored to us. What is lost can be found; what drifted away can be drawn back, by the sheer summoning power of our desire to have it by our sides once again.

In Tyler’s splendid novel “The Amateur Marriage,” a family is shattered when a child goes away. Has she been kidnapped? Is she dead? Would she willfully put them through hell? They don’t know, and that limbo is “the central mystery of their lives, the break at the heart of the family,” Tyler writes.

The theme of a loved one absent without resolution may help to explain the surprising victory of “Crash” in the best picture category at the 2006 Academy Awards. Although much attention has been paid to the racial strife illustrated in “Crash,” there is another resonant thread as well: a troubled young man who simply drops out of his family’s life. They assume he’s out there somewhere, but they can’t be sure. He’s lost and found -- and then lost again, and it’s hard to know which is more painful, the losing or the finding.

Such a theme made hits out of the CBS series “Without a Trace” and “Cold Case,” shows that spotlight mysterious disappearances and the strenuous attempts to fill in the blanks.

These aren’t standard police dramas; they are rich explorations of the momentous impact of absence. Their power derives from the searing sadness that trails in the wake of vanished loved ones. Episodes aren’t cold, abstract puzzles for clever detectives to solve; they are journeys into the heart of loss, a loss that can’t be relieved by tracking a killer or thwarting a bank robbery.

Films, books and TV shows from previous eras often have covered this ground as well, of course; the Fox series “The X-Files” and Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Buried Child” mined the missing-person theme with power and insight. But the current phalanx describes a kind of critical mass, a gathering of specific shadows into a culturewide eclipse of our optimism.

In Munro’s polished, careful tale, a mother contemplates her daughter’s lengthening absence: “All pictures of Penelope were banished to her bedroom, with sheaves of drawings and crayonings she had done before they left Whale Bay.... Also such whimsical gifts for the apartment as a tiny plastic fan to stick on the refrigerator, a wind-up toy tractor, a curtain of glass beads to hang in the bathroom window. The door of that bedroom was shut and in time could be passed without disturbance.”

Relegated to that room is not only the random object, the fading photo, but also the hope -- the hope for a return to the ordinary, for the day when another door opens and the lost loved one walks in, unscathed and unchanged, and the clocks begin to tick again, and the world once more makes sense.

Julia Keller is cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.