"How to Disappear" by Bruna Gomes

Bruna Gomes takes a plunge into the deep end of the pool with her debut work, How to Disappear. Her approach will take an adjustment on the part of readers, but once your adjustments are in place, there are rewards for you here, rewards that promise a bright future for Gomes.

The author does a superb job engaging her readers in the heroine’s stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue. This half clear-eyed, half delusional narrative carries all aspects of the story with it. In fact, while Gomes focusses rightly on her main character’s mental state, in my view her story would benefit from a baby step back from it, to open up a small space for exposition of concrete outside events. Are we sure what happened to her best friend Winnie? There’s room for doubt about whether onetime boyfriend Alejandro is as guilty as assumed. And how does Cille find our protagonist while she’s knocking around in rural Spain? And what of the sister Naomi, who almost inexplicably accepts our hero’s sudden offer of a paid vacation, is shunted off to an exclusive New York apartment and never heard from again?

These may be quibbles, but they strained my suspension of disbelief.

These weaknesses, though, flow from the great strength of the novel. We encounter, up close and personal, a troubled young woman’s journey in which she’s endlessly on the run, a literal outlaw on the lam. Her point of departure seems to be her mother’s untimely death and the resulting deterioration of her relationship with Naomi. But other demons press this young woman into flight and larceny and worse. That we believe and accept these sometimes shocking crimes is clearly a testament to Gomes’s skill in rendering her protagonist’s mental state and motivation.

In fact, I look forward to Bruna Gomes’s future output. She has a grand skill in describing a character’s internal conflict, up to and including a convincingly shaky mental health. She can also describe a physical locale effectively and economically, and the whole sets a mood for the reader quite well. This beginning promises good things to come.