A review by hulttio
We Now Return to Regular Life by Martin Wilson

2.0

‘Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning.’ Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

We Now Return to Regular Life is an ambitious novel that aims to answer the question of ‘what happens next’ when a missing child returns to their family. I don’t have the statistics at hand, but I suspect this is, unfortunately, only a minority of missing persons cases. So we might assume that a child, found safe and returned to a welcoming home, should feel lucky and happy, right? Wilson’s novel explores the themes of recovering from trauma and trauma’s impact on others in the survivor’s social circle. In this book, we mainly have the perspectives of Beth, the child’s sister, and Josh, his childhood ‘friend’/neighbor. I don’t typically enjoy first-person narratives, let alone in YA, but it worked well for this story in helping the reader feel the characters’ emotions—I rarely get so moved by books this way, but the emotions in the novel were extremely intense. I definitely teared up a few times. Wilson aims at answering one main question: In the face of a traumatic tragedy, how does a community pick up the pieces and begin to heal?

The simple, diary-like narration and simple plot (not much actually happens, in the way of physical action) made this a page-turner for me—I read it in a single sitting. Sam, the returned son, brother, and friend, has to navigate his small hometown that has moved on without him for the past three years. The cast includes: his sister, who took him for dead to begin healing; his mother, who never gave up hope and searched obsessively to the detriment of her own welfare; and his childhood friends, who did their best to forget him (child Sam was… not a terribly great person). The returned Sam is also changed in those three years, and has to deal with the public’s watchful eye and consternation, with everyone wondering: ‘Why didn’t he just escape earlier?’ or ‘He’s a man, that kind of thing doesn’t happen to men.’ You get the idea. I thought Wilson did a decent job at setting this book in his native Tuscaloosa, Alabama; it seems a lot more believable in the small-town/suburban south that Sam could face all sorts of negative reactions like this, and explain some of the hate he gets. I’ve visited Alabama, and I noticed that some of the attitudes there can still be… old-fashioned, to say the least.

Side note: I’m a bit confused by the blurb given for this book. It seems a little inaccurate. Specifically, this paragraph: As Beth and Josh struggle with their own issues, their friends and neighbors slowly turn on Sam, until one night when everything explodes. Beth can’t live in silence. Josh can’t live with his secrets. And Sam can’t continue on until the whole truth of what happened to him is out in the open. I’m still not sure what this is referring to. I suppose there could be a number of events that count, but they’re not as intense as this makes it out to be.

So far, it seems that I’ve enjoyed the book. However, as I was reading it, I kept getting a sense of intense déjà vu. I’m a true crime and missing persons ‘enthusiast’ and I’ve read my fair share of cases over the years; not to mention, the blurb mentions a ‘ripped from-the-headlines’ plot. I knew exactly what case Wilson was recreating here, and I went to look up who it was—none other than Shawn Hornbeck, a missing child who disappeared in 2003 and was found in 2007. Who can begrudge Wilson this? After all, though we don’t have any right to it, as spectators we often find ourselves wondering, ‘What happened to that kid? Is he alright now? What was going through his mind when he was captive? What were the gritty, awful details?’ … ad nauseam. So is it any wonder that Wilson fashioned his own attempt at answering some of these questions?

Perhaps the novel could have benefited from showing more of Sam’s own perspective. This would have been a much more difficult novel to write, but also a much more satisfying one. As it is, we only get external perspectives—which means there are a lot of scenes of just narration about past events. There is plenty of mental introspection, but none of it is Sam’s.

Even without his perspective though, the coincidences mounted up. As I started re-reading Hornbeck’s case, I was struck by how many details were lifted by Wilson for the novel. Everything from the fact of the perpetrator using a white truck to Sam/Shawn having piercings and shaggy hair when he returns, only to have his hair cut and piercings removed for the clean, suburban Oprah interview. Even the name of one of Sam’s friends is the same as Shawn’s—Tony, a boy who lived near him during his captive years and whom he befriended. Some of the dialogue also felt strangely familiar, as if I had heard Shawn speaking that way during interviews. There is ‘ripped from-the-headlines’ and then there is… taking up actual facts to fill in your novel.

If I were Shawn, I’d feel quite queasy that someone had taken this visceral and traumatic thing that happened to me and made a fictional novel out of it, let alone making money from it. It is clear that Wilson was thinking of cases like Hornbeck, and perhaps even Steven Stayner, but he mentions none of these in the acknowledgments or dedication, or anywhere. These ‘coincidences’ unfortunately left a sour taste in my mouth; so though I enjoyed the novel, at least minimally, the facts were too close to the truth for comfort. Fact is indeed stranger than fiction.

Also, fun fact: did you know that Susannah Cahalan (of the Brain on Fire [my review] memoir) actually made one of her first major career moves in writing a breaking story about the Shawn Hornbeck case? She wrote an interesting write-up of the Hornbeck case, all while she was a student at nearby Washington University in St. Louis. She managed to get an exclusive interview with Devlin, the perpetrator, though he was denied media visitors at the time—she simply wrote ‘friend’ in her visitation request. And somehow, Devlin was okay with this, as well as opening up to a stranger about how he felt. He even OK-ed her to come in for a second, exclusive interview. Devlin’s attorneys tried to put a gag order on Cahalan, but it failed. All of this made her a minor media celebrity for a little bit—and all in 2007 at the age of twenty-two, two years before her now-famous battle with the terrible ‘month of madness’ that she recounts in her memoir.

In any case, I highly recommend reading her write-up of the Hornbeck case if you are unfamiliar. I’m not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend reading this book. Aside from the aforementioned issues, the writing style is a bit clunky, with weird dialogue choices and actions attributed to characters that don’t align with their age or personality. There are strange scenes that left me wondering why Wilson even wrote them, or included them in the book. (Without giving too much away, I will say: the cycle of trauma?) If you are looking for a miraculous, son-returns-home story, you might as well read up on the actual Shawn Hornbeck case. This is a decent fictional account of the aftermath, something we all might like to wonder at, but there are too many common threads to the actual case if you are well-versed in it. There are plenty of memoirs written by real kidnapping victims that detail their trials (e.g., Jaycee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch), and those might be more worthy to read. (Unfortunately it seems like post-abduction adapting is hard for many of them, and they often lead troubled lives or face struggles with addiction or finding a sense of belonging again.) I enjoyed it in a lukewarm sense, in that it was a gripping novel, and might recommend it… but with some reservations and caveats. Caveat lector!