‘Missing Sam’: This novel about a marriage shaken by an abduction takes the easy way out
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“Don’t ever go to bed angry.”
An advice as old as marriage itself. In Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, Missing Sam, it becomes a fault line. The novel opens with Samantha O’Malley and Aliya Mirza doing exactly what they shouldn’t: going to bed furious. The next day, Sam goes for a run alone and doesn’t come back.
That is the hook. But Umrigar is far more interested in the marriage itself than in the disappearance. What matters to her are the generational and deeply personal forces that made that night’s fight inevitable, and the long work of living with the consequences.
Not like the other
Sam, a white Irish-American poet and academic, and Ali, a Brown, Muslim, Indian-American interior designer, have been together for eight years. Their marriage is a good one, albeit complicated by the baggage each drags in from their respective childhoods. Sam’s father was violent, a man who taught his daughter that public humiliation was unforgivable. Meanwhile, Ali’s father policed his daughter’s life in the name of faith, leaving her with an unquenchable appetite for freedom. When Sam watches Ali laugh a little too freely with a friend, two family histories collide. Ali reflects, the morning after, that “Sam and I are both doomed...