The Disapparation of James

by Anne Ursu

Overview

From the highly praised author of Spilling Clarence, a luminous novel about the joy of family and the perils of loving.

The Woodrow family is going to the circus to celebrate Greta's seventh birthday. When five-year-old brother James eagerly volunteers to join the magic act, his parents watch with pride as he climbs onto the stage alongside the clown. The trick is spectacular and applause rings through the crowd as James disappears—vanishing before their very eyes. The trouble is, James really did disappear . . . into thin air.

In the aftermath of James's disappearance, with the police investigation providing no clues, the laws of the universe come into question. His mother becomes lost in her dreams and his father becomes obsessed with the clown, while his big sister Greta sets out to figure out what happened.

A novel peppered with dreams, premonitions, and possible realities, The Disapparation of James is a work of enormous sensitivity, tenderness, and wit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786886630
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	01/28/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Anne Ursu is the author of Spilling Clarence. She has worked at a major book retailer, as the theater critic for City Pages (Minneapolis), and as an arts writer for the Portland Phoenix (Maine). She lives in Mountain View, California.

Reading Group Guide

1. Why do you think the book is called "The Disapparation of James" instead "The Disappearance of James?"

2. What is the role of magic in the novel? How "real" is the world in which the novel takes place?

3. What do you think of the relationship between Hannah and Justin at the beginning on the novel? How would you describe it? What happens to their relationship over the course of the novel? How do their roles change in relationship to one another?

4. What is the effect of the "Saturday That Never Happened" chapter? Why do you think the author chose to include it?

5. Describe the relationship between Hannah and her sister. What clues do we have as to its history, and how it's gotten this way? What happens to Catherine and her relationship to Hannah over the course of the novel?

6. There are a number of references to fairy tales and children’s books in the novel. How is this story like and unlike a fairy tale?

7. There are a number of dreams in the book. What do they reveal about the characters? What do you think their role in the book is? Why might the author have chosen to include them?

8. How do our perceptions of Mike the Clown change over the course of the novel? How do they relate to the other characters' perceptions of him?

9. How does this experience change the adult characters in the book -- Hannah, Justin, and Tom? Where have they begun and where do they end up?

10. What do you think about Tom's progression through the novel? What makes him react the way he does? How do you feel about his actions?

11. Why do you think the author chose not to reveal what happened to James? If the book had portrayed James's experience, what do you think it might have been?

12. Why do you think the novel ends the way it does? Where the story leave us? What do you think the novel is trying to say about the nature of love and family?

13. Where do you think the characters will go from here?

Editorial Reviews

Greta's seventh birthday is a gala occasion. To celebrate it, the Woodrow family goes en masse to the circus, where Greta's little brother, James, climbs to the stage as a volunteer in a vanishing act. Vanish he does, but as the trick nears completion, something goes terribly awry: James doesn't rematerialize. As family and police investigate this unnatural disappearance, the Woodrow cosmology begins to split apart and re-form in radiant new groupings.

bn.com

Alternative realities and parallel plot lines coexist in Ursu's surreal but psychologically acute second novel (after Spilling Clarence), in which a boy chosen from a circus audience to disappear during a clown's magic act really does disappear. Hannah and Justin Woodrow bring their daughter, Greta, to the circus for her seventh birthday, along with her five-year-old brother, James. Greta is outgoing, quick-witted and full of energy, while James is so quiet his mother plans to bring him to a specialist for tests. Both parents thrill when James is selected from the audience and responds charmingly to the clown's every request. Then, suddenly, James is gone. The police assign someone to watch over the family, but the officer turns from friend to aggressor while Mike the Clown is transformed from suspect to victim. Hannah dissociates, Justin obsesses and Greta does research. The child is the only one who is able to confront the loss directly. Ursu mixes realistic depictions of police interrogations and domestic tensions with fantastic interludes like a chapter imagining the day after James's disappearance as it would have been if the disappearance had not occurred. She delicately probes the worry and longing, guilt and rage, protectiveness and resentment that characterize parental love. James's "disapparation" is even more a mystery at the end of the novel than at the beginning, but it doesn't seem to matter, since Ursu wins the reader over with her humane wisdom and charming vision of the limitless possibilities of a child's imagination.

Publishers Weekly

With the matter-of-fact ease of a master fabulist, Ursu plays out all of the consequences of her novel's fantastical premise, crafting a deft, character-driven narrative about a family thrown into crisis by a child's mysterious disappearnce.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Seductive...like Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, "The Disapparation of James" celebrates the glory of ordinary life in the midst of trauma.

Newsday

Ursu gently teases out the tale of a close-knit family whose youngest child, James, vanishes into thin air--literally. (A circus magician makes the kid--poof!--disappear, then can't bring him back.) Househusband Justin and his doctor wife, Hannah, find their blissful world suddenly frail and full of child-size holes. But James' sister seven-year-old Greta, reaches into her imagination to locate her brother: "lots of times when there's a mystery there's a clue, too, and it's up to the girl to figure it out, because adults just don't." Ursu's story is sweetly done, her own compelling magic trick.

Entertainment Weekly

James's unnatural disappearance is a singularity that neither police work nor magic can explain, let alone undo, and its complex interaction with the novel's realistic elements -- so different from the simple accretion of realistic detail with which other writers, Stephen King for instance, have sought to dramatize the horror of a child in danger -- manages to seriously creep out the reader. What happens in the rest of the novel should not be described here, for, despite its postmodern embrace of artifice, Ursu's novel manages to elicit from the reader a very old-fashioned response: anxiety for what will come next. Mysterious and ultimately moving, The Disapparation of James powerfully evokes the tenderness of the bond between parent and child, and the parent's never-ending awareness of its fragility.

Washington Post Book World

Ursu's storytelling is engaging and pleasantly disorienting.

Bookstreet USA

A florid and in the end pointless account of a boy's disappearance, written by Ursu (Spilling Clarence, 2002) in a tone of the utmost gravitas. What is every parent's worst fear? Losing a child, of course. Ask Justin and Hannah Woodrow. A modern midwestern couple (working Mom, stay-at-home Dad), the Woodrows are devoted to their children (Greta and James) and to each other. On Greta's seventh birthday, they all go the Lindberg Performing Arts Center to see the Razzlers Circus Stage Show, which includes a disappearing act by Mike the Clown. Mike asks for volunteers and five-year-old James runs up to the stage, where Mike makes him disappear-but not come back. A Seinfeld episode? Not really, since no one (the cops least of all) is laughing. The eerie Mike is held for questioning but soon released (habeas corpus doesn't help much in vanishing cases), and Officer Tom Johnson has to admit that there's not a clue in sight. It's hard on the family, of course: Hannah sinks into depression, Justin becomes obsessed with magic and tracks down magicians to buy their secrets, and little Greta turns into a housebound introvert convinced she can will James back from the void. Eventually, Officer Johnson moves into their house for full-time surveillance, and Mike the Clown finds that his act has become more popular than ever as a result of ghoulish publicity. In the end, James returns as mysteriously as he left, and the Woodrows are happily reunited-though permanently scarred by their awareness that the worst calamity is always possible. A mess, with a circular plot and overripe style ("How do you contain so much prose and still exist?"): the sort of story that shouldn't have been let out of theworkshop.

Kirkus Reviews