Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth

Novels about missing people seem to be a genre in themselves. So many crime novels that I read about (and never read) are about missing children or missing women – massive turn-offs for me, partly because I’ve heard that they tend towards the gruesome, but also because I am fully Team Staunch Book Prize. Which is one of the reasons why I was keen to read Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth (2021 – a new novel!!) – because here it is the man who goes missing. Also it’s a novel by Jenn Ashworth, and I always want to read those.

The narrator is Laurie, a cleaner at a university who has been married to Mark for some time – they initially met at a wedding, where a psychic called Joyce thought they were already a couple. The novel opens with an ordinary scene of the two waking up together – talking about a broken curtain, about staying up too late. Unspokenly considering morning sex, and unspokenly deciding against. Getting up to make a cup of tea.

It’s hard to know how other couples live their lives, but all of this had become utterly ordinary for us. I told the police as much, later. I left for work while he was still in the shower. I don’t know what he was wearing that day. No, he hadn;t seemed unusual in any way that morning. 

The officers – they sent two, a man and a woman who both refused a hot drink and made notes on a tablet instead of in a notebook – seemed frustrated by the fact that no matter how they phrased their questions I had nothing to add – no suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary behaviour on his part – to my account. I didn’t tell them I was pissed off with him, but I am telling you now.

One of the unsettling things about the novel is that we don’t know who’s the ‘you’ that Laurie is speaking to, or even when the ‘now’ is. Mark might not have displayed any out-of-the-ordinary behaviour, but Laurie certainly does. Her emotional reaction to Mark disappearing is subdued. She is speaking directly to us, but holding back from any outburst or breakdown. She doesn’t tell people that Mark has gone missing – whenever his mother Mavis phones, she says he’s in the shower or otherwise unavailable. It’s several weeks before Laurie even contacts the police.

This is nothing as conventional as the unreliable narrator – except inasmuch as every narrator is unreliable. Laurie isn’t really connected with her own thoughts on and responses to this seismic event. Ghosted reminded me often of My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. Laurie doesn’t unravel in the same way as that wife-of-a-missing-husband, but there is the same eerie inability to conform to anticipated reactions. Laurie certainly isn’t ignoring Mark’s disappearance, but her thoughts about it always skirt around the conventional. Everything in this novel skirts around the conventional, in fact. There is no desperate hunt to find him – but rather a sort of dispassionate paranoia and anxiety.

I know now the reason I was so reluctant to tell her that Mark had left me was because I feared she would blame me for driving her adored son away. Whatever made idea was currently gripping him and sending him across the country, it would be me that had planted it in his mind. My responsibility, at least, to pluck it out before it could take root. My task, as his lover and wife, to make home a sanctuary and a paradise that he could not bear to leave. If he’d found another woman – someone better groomed, more sympathetic, more likely to store colanders in the correct cupboard – well, he couldn’t be blamed for that. And underneath all that, the fear: once Mavis had decided this was all her fault, she would leave me too.

Mark’s isn’t the only disappearance in the novel. A second plot is Laurie’s relationship with her father, whose mind is gradually disappearing – and also his cleaner-turned-helper Olena, who is closer with him than Laurie is. Ashworth shows the shifting and sad relationship between father and daughter with the same subtle complexity that she does everything, pieced together with memories of the past and anxieties about the future. Other threads are Laurie’s obsession with a young girl who was murdered years earlier, tracking down psychic Joyce, and some money that Olena might have stolen. All are wound together naturally and cleverly, never quite going in the way you expect.

And that’s the brilliance of Ashworth’s writing, I think. Her novels are often unsettling and odd, but every moment is plausible. As soon as it happens, it feels exactly right, even as she resists the natural next steps and anticipated reactions. Overall, Ghosted leans towards the ambiguous and uncertain, but in a way that makes any alternative pathway from her initial premise feel unnatural and stilted. It’s another excellent and consistently interesting success from one of the few still-publishing authors whose books I will always look out for.

8 thoughts on “Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth

  • June 17, 2021 at 7:47 pm
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    I’m somewhat familiar with Ashworth’s work, as I read “A Kind of Intimacy” some years back and really enjoyed it; can’t think why I haven’t read another of her novels since then. Maybe this will be the one! Thanks BTW for the link to Team Staunch Book Prize. I hadn’t heard of it and think it’s a great idea.

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  • June 17, 2021 at 7:56 pm
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    I haven’t read anything by Jenn Ashworth but I have meant to. This one does sound very intruiging, and yes it’s nice that it’s not a woman or child who disappears.

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  • June 17, 2021 at 8:11 pm
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    This is an author I’m not familiar with. The novel sounds intriguing. I’ll put it on my list!

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  • June 17, 2021 at 9:29 pm
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    I hadn’t heard of the Staunch Book Prize (tumbleweed moment?) but I’m all for it.

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  • June 18, 2021 at 12:01 pm
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    Ooh, this sounds good! And wow, I agree, there are like ZERO books where a man goes missing, unless he just actually runs off. (I feel like I heard about a memoir — which I now can’t remember — where the woman’s partner vanished and she of course was very upset, filed a missing persons, etc etc., and then years later she ran into him somewhere and he was completely fine and had just left her. What a poop!)

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    • June 22, 2021 at 10:49 pm
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      Ughh NO ta sir.

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  • June 19, 2021 at 11:05 am
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    I’d not heard of this author at all but she sounds a unique voice. Your review had me googling and I read an interesting interview about her refusal to attend school. I’ll look out for her work from now on.

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    • June 22, 2021 at 10:49 pm
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      I think I most recommend Fell and Notes Made While Falling.

      Reply

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