The Moment She Was Gone

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary Empathy for the Families of the Mentally Ill
Review: As a psychiatrist with forty years experience, I was awe-struck by the impressive insight shown in this novel by veteran writer Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain). He demonstrates extraordinary awareness of the almost unbearable difficulties that the loving families of severely mentally ill persons often endure. His focus is purposely on the response of the family, not the inner experience of the sick family member, and this aspect of this all-too-common situation has received scant attention in fiction.

The narrator of the book is the twin brother of a young woman whose erratic behavior has been written off as merely eccentric for years until she is placed in an Italian hospital during an 'episode,' as it's referred to, and his and the family's initially grudging recognition of the extent of her illness. The narrator himself finds that he has powerful resistance to accepting the validity of her diagnosis. I hesitate to say more for fear I will spoil the suspense that Hunter so carefully sets up in his tersely written novel, but suspect you will not be able to put this book down once you've started it.

I have intense admiration for Hunter's ability to describe what I have seen so many times in my own practice. I have repeatedly observed the kinds of self-protective distortions and myths that grow up in families about the ill family member, defenses that usually finally have to give way to crushing reality. I've so often seen the emotional price they pay trying to help their loved one. Hunter writes about this with compassion and understanding.

I would also recommend a recent non-fiction account with a similar theme: "The Outsider: A Journey into My Father's Struggle with Madness" by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, also available here at Amazon.

Scott Morrison

Rating:
Summary: AN ASSURED READING OF A FAMILY'S STORY
Review: Evan Hunter who also writes thriller-dillers under the name Ed McBain is a pro at creating compelling scenarios. Dan Futterman, whom many applauded as Robin Williams's son in "The Bird Cage," is also a master of his craft, as is evident in his assured reading of this tale of emotional dysfunction

When Andrew Gulliver receives a predawn phone call from his mother telling him that his twin sister, Annie, is missing it is not the first time. As a teenager Annie had disappeared without a trace, only to later reappear just as surprisingly as she had vanished. This was a pattern that she continued through adulthood.

Much of her story is told in flashbacks, as her various odysseys to far off places are recounted. However, just a short while ago Annie was restrained in a mental hospital in Sicily where she was given various drug treatments which seemed to exacerbate her illness rather than control it. She is diagnosed as being schizophrenic.

One of the questions that crosses Andrew's mind as he searches for his sister is whether or not he, too, may be mentally ill. Has their family played a part in his sister's dysfunction?

The Gullivers must face their past and what may be their future during this traumatic time. Hunter writes with perception and compassion of people riven by emotional illness...

Rating:
Summary: Who cares when she left, they ALL stayed too long!!!!
Review: I stopped reading half way through the book. I realize the characters were supposed to be confusing, yet mysterious enough to keep us intrigued; instead the family members were little more than caricatures of every disfunctional family ever imagined. Some novels are character driven, others rely on plot.This book is devoid of both. Mr. Hunter has great abilility, but this book seems more like a rough draft; that needs a stabilizing narrator the reader can identify with; then a finished work. Extremely disappointing, I want my time and money back.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing tale about a mentally ill woman and her family.
Review: In a departure for him, Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), has written a domestic drama, "The Moment She Was Gone." It is the story of a family in crisis because one of its members is schizophrenic.

Annie Gulliver has always been a beautiful, vibrant and intelligent individual. She and her twin brother, Andrew, are extremely close, and Andrew thinks that he knows and understands Annie more than anyone. However, after exhibiting alarming behavior changes over a period of years, Annie disappears one day, and no one knows where she has gone.

In a series of flashbacks, Hunter shows Annie's behavior becoming increasingly erratic. She drops out of school and, financed by her mother, Annie travels all over the world. She has outlandish experiences, some real and others, the products of an increasingly delusional mind. During a trip to Sicily, Annie claims that she was attacked. After retaliating against her "attacker," Annie is arrested and subsequently institutionalized. Her psychiatrist diagnoses her as schizophrenic and Andrew travels to Italy to take Annie home.

Although the twins' brother Aaron and his wife, Augusta, believe that Annie needs psychiatric help, it takes years for Andrew and his mother to acknowledge that Annie is seriously ill. They chalk up her bizarre behavior to eccentricity. Only after the evidence of her illness is incontrovertible, do they finally take responsibility for getting Annie the help that she so desperately needs.

This is a very sad picture of a dysfunctional family in denial. Unfortunately, "The Moment She Was Gone" does not coalesce into a compelling story. Hunter's novel rambles as he goes back and forth in time, describing Annie's troublesome statements and her bizarre actions, as well as her family's reactions to the changes in her. This makes for a rather flimsy story.

I would recommend this book mostly for people who are interested in fiction dealing with how individuals and families suffer as a result of this tragic illness. Although "The Moment She Was Gone" is a decent character study and it addresses an extremely important subject, it is unlikely to appeal to a wide range of readers.

Rating:
Summary: The Moment She Was Gone
Review: Like a lot of Ed McBain / Evan Hunter devotees, the long wait for The Moment She Was Gone was agonizing, yet worthwhile. Hunter takes the reader through the long story of a family touched by mental illness. While the book keeps your attention, the reader can't but help drifting off into the real world where each and everyone knows of a family member or someone elses family where someone suffers from a mental illness that comes and goes. As this book comes to a close, we see that some mental illness is never resolved.

I would recommend this book to anyone that likes a story that will provoke them to thinking the unthinkable.

Rating:
Summary: Evan Hunter is The Master at just everything he attempts
Review: Mr. Hunter won me over for the umpteenth time with this one, given that I've been reading - and loving - for a good thirty years the work of this extraordinary author, both as Evan Hunter and as Ed McBain (I pride myself about not having skipped any title whatsoever in McBain's own nearly fifty-year-old 87th Precinct police procedural series, a never ending stream of genial and inventive writing which has been ripped off by virtually anyone, especially TV shows, without ever achieving results which can be remotely compared to its original brilliance).

The first Evan Hunter novel I ever read was Second Ending (1956), and it greatly affected my teenage years. I read it and re-read it so many times that my old paperback copy is by now nearly destroyed. The latest Hunter to grace my bookshelves is, of course, this melancholic, somewhat elegiac and yet achingly realistic-feeling gem, The Moment She Was Gone. I caught some intriguing analogies between these two Hunter masterpieces.

Both novels show us the deep sufferings of frail young people - in Second Ending it was twentysomething heroin addict/former brilliant jazz musician Andy Silvera; now it's thirtysomething schizophrenic/former brilliant student Annie Gulliver.

Both novels offer riveting and layered portrayals of a badly damaged yet sensitive person, once full of promises, caught in the titanic struggle of coping with the very essence of his/her sufferings as well as with the nostalgia for a past which can't return. Then again, we actually see all of that mainly through the eyes of a sort of chorus (Andy's friends there, Annie's family here), and especially through the eyes of the one single person (Bud Donato there, Annie's twin, Andy, here) whose soul is closest than anyone else's to the suffering, struggling one.

In both novels the result is staggeringly beautiful, and also - in the end - powerfully cathartic. At the end of their (and our own) respective emotional journeys, we find that our "guides" - Bud Donato there, Andy Gulliver here - have grown dramatically, becoming better beings, more open-minded ones, more understanding ones, and they have to thank for that none other than their "flawed" loved ones. This is a beautiful concept.

What also strikes me in The Moment She Was Gone is Evan Hunter's uncanny ability to faithfully - yet emotionally - portray the life of a schizophrenic person's family like it actually is in reality.
I've known two girls who were exactly like Annie Gulliver. One, the sister of a male schoolmate of mine, committed suicide many years ago, in her early twenties, by jumping out of a window. It wasn't her first suicide attempt. She was an incredibly brilliant student, just like her brother, my friend.
The other girl is luckily alive, even though for years she refused to take her medications and transformed her mother's life into a permanent nightmare; she was a former classmate of my sister, and she had what everyone initially defined just "an artistic streak" - she made jewelry just like Annie Gulliver did, she wrote poems, she was also as beautiful as an angel ...

I saw these two girls closely mirrored in Annie Gulliver's struggle with her own inner voices, as well as I saw their families closely mirrored in Andy Gulliver, his mother, his brother Aaron, his sister-in-law Augusta ...

Evan Hunter delivers here a perfect blend of realism, craft and - most of all - overwhelming humanity. A must-read, and five stars out of five.