Missing Persons must have been a very difficult book to write, for certainly it is difficult to read. This is not due to any defects of style or execution – it is an expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist. The difficulty for the reader is in struggling to absorb the pain and pity of the story, or stories, which it relates.
All families nurse guilty secrets, secret sorrows, as Clair Wills acknowledges. Most of us are content to leave such matters undisturbed; not so Wills, who, with fortitude and much honest misgiving, puts on private trial a family, a generation and, indeed, an entire people and finds them guilty. She refrains, however,…
