Iris owns a vintage clothing store. Her life is just beginning to fall into place. But one day, out of the blue, a certain Euphemia — or Esme— Lennox comes out of the woodwork and changes things forever.

When reading O’Farrell’s novel, you are asked to forget everything you know about families. Confronting difficult topics such as insanity, infirmity, intimacy, and even incest, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is not a pleasant story. In fact, it constantly challenges both the reader and the traditional nostalgic notion that the past is always somehow better than the present. 

The word ‘Innovation’ springs to mind when thinking about exactly what it is that O’Farrell does with this novel. Her concept, plot, and approach are all unlike common fiction. However, her subject matter is, sadly, not a new phenomenon. 

The saddest, and perhaps scariest, part about Esme Lennox’s story is the fact that it could well be a true one. Children were sent to travel “home” from the Colonies in the 1930s and did see loved ones succumb to cholera. During the end of the twentieth century, asylums did close and patients came to light who had been forgotten behind bars for decades, just like Esme.

As for O’Farrell’s writing, it becomes the perfect counterpart to the plot — the well-needed uplift to counterbalance the downtrodden motifs and individuals throughout. Flashbacks to humid childhood in India, distressing ramblings of a dementia patient, a modern love story, and a series of inner monologues all swirl together to form a fragmented narrative that reveals, little by little, a family’s failure to protect their own.

The vividness with which O’Farrell paints Esme’s tragic tale is almost painful, presenting readers with a shifting series of images surrounding pain, grief, fear, sickness, and loneliness from multiple perspectives.  The constant return to “two girls at a dance” and other haunting images transform the pages into a syntactic hall of mirrors, trapping the reader with warped truths that aren’t set right until the end. 

We have to commend O’Farrell for her excellent ability to never leave her readers at ease for too long. Just when we enjoy a mindful moment — a paddle in the sea, a shared knowing glance — the rug is pulled out from beneath us and the prose takes a downward turn. Reading this book is the equivalent of standing on the edge of a sheer drop. At the bottom? The worst thing of all: the truth.