Purchase a copy for yourself here!
What is Missing is the first novel from Michael Frank, whose debut memoir, The Mighty Franks, was released in 2017 to wide critical acclaim. The novel centers around three characters whose lives first intersect in Italy, when the recently widowed translator, Costanza, meets a son and father duo that change her life forever. Costanza is visiting a pensione in Florence on the one year anniversary of the death of her husband, the celebrated writer Martin Sarnoff. Florence holds a lot of memories for Costanza, who spent time there in her youth with her long deceased American father and her Italian mother. Staying at the same pensione is the American fertility doctor, Henry Weissman, who is giving a lecture, and his brooding seventeen year old son, Andrew. Costanza first runs into Andrew, and the two form a friendship, before Costanza meets Henry, and they begin a brief affair that shatters the intimacy that Costanza and Andrew previously shared.
Upon returning to New York several months later, Costanza contacts Henry and the two reignite their affair, and Costanza moves in with Henry and Andrew, vacating the apartment that reminds her of her deceased husband. Despite all of Henry and Constanza’s professions of love and devotion to each other, it is clear that their relationship fills an empty space for each of them. They have both lost their partners (Henry is divorced), and their relationship becomes a way to fill the void that is growing in both of their lives. The triangle between Henry, Costanza, and Andrew becomes further complicated when Costanza and Henry decide to try to have a child together. Costanza had trouble getting pregnant during her first marriage, and thus she begins appointments in Henry’s fertility clinic for IVF treatments, a process that greatly fractures their relationship dynamic and both of their psyches.
Under the broad theme of familial concerns, the novel centers mainly on the issues of infertility, childhood traumas, and father-son dynamics. The relationship between Henry and his son is fractured far before the relationship between Henry and Costanza becomes strained, and almost all of the sections told from Andrew’s perspective focus on either the distance between Andrew and his father, or the jealousy he feels at his father and Costanza’s intimacy. The novel often alludes to its closing drama, it is on a clear Oedipus-esque track from even the opening scenes. The novel becomes a bit heavy handed when Andrew references Hamlet while meditating on his dislike for his father, recalling the line, “I am too much in the sun.”
The final scenes of the novel could be seen coming from a mile away, however this does not make them any less upsetting when they come. The conclusion feels exploitative, predatory, and unfair, a flare of drama that feels entirely un-thoughtful in its context. The strength of the novel is in its middle sections, when it thoughtfully plumbs the depths of its characters’ individual histories with trauma, artfully reasserting these traumas into its characters’ daily lives in order to provoke introspection. The conclusion is wholly uneven, and the opening drags quite a bit, but overall the novel has some interesting things on its mind, even if it does not present them in the most appealing fashion.