Of Things Gone Astray
Janina Matthewson
279 pages - 2014 - fiction, fantasy
May 27th, 2024 — May 30th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I knew from the first line that I would greatly enjoy this book. I have been a fan of Janina Matthewson’s work since the podcast “Within the Wires” began in 2016, on which she works with “Welcome to Night Vale” writer Jeffrey Cranor. Last summer, I read the book that the two of them wrote together, You Feel It Just Below The Ribs, which is set within the same universe. I loved that book, and I’ve loved their podcast, but I had never experienced something that Janina wrote herself. It starts off by saying:
Mrs. Featherby had been having pleasant dreams until she woke to discover the front of her house had vanished overnight.
This book has more depth and weight to it than meets the eye. It takes roots and does not let go until there are leaves budding on the ends of the canopy branches. I did not know what to expect, which is how I prefer going into the things I read, and to say that I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement.
The book revolves around a rather large cast of characters, who have all lost something. In some cases, the thing that they have lost is an item, like the keys of their piano; in others, it is something intangible, like their sense of direction. It is a story of loss, in both the literal sense but also the more philosophical sense, and the grief that comes with it. But it is also equally so a book about growth, and change, and things being found.
I read this book in two large chunks, because I could not seem to put it down. The chapters are incredibly short, so it is natural to just keep turning the page, but more than that, I was pulled into the lives of the characters from the beginning.
I did not expect to cry at the end. It is not a blatantly sad book. But it was beautiful. Suddenly, there were two circles marking where my tears had fallen onto the acknowledgements page.
This is a book that I wish I could read for the first time again. There are no big reveals, but it is delightfully unpredictable. It is just fantastical enough wrapped in a story that is horribly, heartbreakingly real. I hope more people read it.
Summary (Spoilers!)
Mrs. Featherby is an older woman who is living alone when, as the first line says, the front wall of her house suddenly vanishes. The builders are no help, and say that if she wants her house to be restored, she’ll have to wait on custom bricks. In the meantime, they put up a semi-clear plastic tarp. People seem to take this as an invitation, and she finds herself on the receiving end of many visitors and guests who see it fit to strike up a conversation with the woman sitting peacefully in her home.
Cassie is a young woman, just twenty, who is waiting at the airport arrivals gate for her girlfriend, Floss, a carefree young woman from another country who has promised that she will visit. However, she does not get off the plane on which she said she would be arriving. Cassie waits at the airport for hours, rooted to the spot. Literally. She realizes that her feet have grown roots into the floor; she has started transforming into a tree.
Delia is a woman, growing older, who lives with her wheelchair-bound mother. The two of them had been involved in some sort of accident that left her mother paralyzed. Delia, in a past life, had been studying for a master’s degree that we find out much later was in fine art. She is living in the house in which she grew up, the town in which she has lived her whole life. However, one day, she gets lost in her own neighborhood and realizes that she has lost her sense of direction.
Robert is a husband and a father, working a rather boring office job. He tries to go to work one day to find that he has lost his job, not in the sense that he was fired, but in the way that the entire building has vanished. He cannot contact his coworkers and the people working in other buildings on the street do not remember there ever being an office building there. He frantically searches for it, but eventually settles into a life of calm, homeschooling his daughter Bonny while Maya, his wife, works her dream job.
Marcus is an older man, a retired famous pianist, whose husband Albert passed many years before him despite Albert being the younger one of the pair. His daughter Katharine was adopted from an actress who made some questionable choices. Marcus realizes that the keys are missing from the green piano he and his father built together when he was only twenty-one. He falls into a delirious state, and his daughter has to look after him. They replace the keys, but they are not the same, and he feels lost without the ability to make music.
Jake is a little boy, the son of Anthony and the now-deceased Holly. Throughout the book, we get snippets of the story of her death from Jake’s perspective, but he is always interrupting them to criticize his own storytelling. At one point, he says that it could not have been snowing, so the story was all wrong; he cannot remember all of the perfect small details. Jake’s father, Anthony, has grown distant since Holly’s death. Jake, on the other hand, finds himself drawn to lost things. He purchases an item from a secondhand store that was lost and realizes that he can determine the origin of the item and the story behind it by holding it and focusing very hard. It takes a lot of energy, but he starts collecting and cataloguing lost things. He finds his way into his school’s lost and found; eventually he makes his way to the zoo and the airport lost and found areas as well, snatching all the lost items he can find.
Anthony finds Delia wandering, lost, one day, and helps her find her way. This happens again, and then again, and they start to become friendly. Delia desperately does not want to have to rely on a man to find her way around, but he is more than happy to help her, and Delia’s mother is grateful to have some time in the house to herself for once. The two start seeing each other romantically, but the energy of their relationship shifts something in the air. Suddenly, Anthony is forgetting Jake.
When Delia asks him about Jake, he seems confused at first, like he doesn’t remember he has a son. Eventually, when she says his name, it is as though she has said nothing at all, and Anthony does not hear her. He becomes unable to see his own son, having difficulty explaining why food is being eaten off of plates without seemingly anyone interfering. Over time, Jake cannot see his father either, and the two of them live like ghosts in each other’s lives. Delia desperately tries to get them to see each other again.
Robert realizes that he is happy not working. He finds a hidden passion for woodworking when Maya asks him to clean out the shed one day and he finds some good-quality wood. He makes a chest, then some furniture, and eventually he starts carving all the wood he can find, including the bannisters in their home. Maya is frustrated, but his daughter is thrilled.
Bonny starts going to the house across the street, with the funny front wall that’s actually just a tarp. She can see the old woman sitting in her sitting room and goes over to ask her questions. Mrs. Featherby, although annoyed at first with these disturbances, takes a liking to the little girl. They start meeting regularly for tea, and Mrs. Featherby looks forward to Bonny announcing her presence. When Bonny goes on a short vacation, Mrs. Featherby waits and waits for the little girl, but is dismayed when she does not show up. She realizes that maybe she likes the openness of her front wall and delays the builders from repairing her “broken” home.
Marcus is taken to a play one night by his daughter, where he sees an old piano in the parlor. Despite warnings from signs and theater staff, he starts to play. He was formerly a famous pianist and seemingly nobody tries to stop him once he gets going. He plays for quite a while, making up for all the time he lost without his piano keys. They had repaired his one at home, but it was not the same as the one he made, so he refuses to even touch the foreign keys. This piano, at the theater, does fine; once he stops, though, he realizes that his hands are not his own. They are red and swollen, and he can barely write, let alone play anything. He pens two letters, one to Maya, saying he will teach Bonny piano, and one to his daughter, saying everything he couldn’t say for the past few decades.
Cassie is turning into a tree, slowly over time. Grass grows around her, replacing the tile floor of the airport terminal. People often stop by and just start chatting with her, telling her secrets. Her mother is almost always there, but her best friend Bridie stays with her when her mother needs a moment to rest. She is seen by doctors and an arborist, but nobody can explain what’s going on. And Floss never comes.
Bonny sees Cassie one day, when they’re returning from their vacation. She asks a great deal of questions, and then they go on their way. Robert realizes that he isn’t happy in London, and Maya realizes it, too, asking him if they should move away, at least for a few years.
Jake finds a lost letter that was meant for Cassie, and he remembers seeing her in the airport one day while looking for lost things. He makes his way there. Delia, though, goes to his house and finds that he’s gone; she begs Anthony to help her find Jake, but he does not even hear her. We learn that Jake’s mother died in an earthquake. She was about to take her son to the doctor’s, and he was excited because that meant they would get McDonald’s after. She went back inside to grab something, and Jake noticed that the roof was rippling like water, and suddenly the house was gone, and his mother with it.
Jake makes it to the tree, and there is another shift. Suddenly, Delia knows exactly where to go; she doesn’t know how she knows it, but she follows her instincts. Anthony remembers that he has a son, and slowly realizes how important it is to follow Delia. The two adults find their way to the airport where they see Jake sleeping underneath the tree, now fully a tree. Delia leaves to let them have a moment together, father and son. As she goes, Anthony says, “What a woman.” The last line of the book is:
And the branches around them rustled.
Lost and Found
There was something incredibly sad that permeated this entire story. I think it is the inherent pain that comes with loss, whether it is losing something like an earring or a person. The premise of this book is that there are things that are lost that may never be found, at least not by the original owner. But those things may be found by someone new, and they may grant those things new meaning.
One of the things that hit me hardest was the growth shown in the characters. It is most blatant, I think, in Mrs. Featherby; at first, she is appalled at the idea that people will be constantly trying to talk to her simply because there is no wall separating her from the people outside. At the end of the book, though, she is waiting for Bonny to appear and start up a conversation. She puts off the building of the wall for at least two weeks, relieved that she has a little more time without a wall and with all her somewhat-new neighbors.
Cassie’s story was the most heartbreaking in my eyes. She is waiting for someone that is never going to come, and that we know is never going to come. On some level, she most likely understands that herself. But she waits for so long that she spends the rest of her life waiting. Even when she is turning into a tree, when people ask her what’s happening, she says that she’s waiting for Floss to appear. She does not resent the roots growing from her. She does not even resent Floss. She holds onto this naive belief that her person will come back to her.
But her friend Bridie tells her all the reasons that Floss was not the one. She mentions that Cassie almost never laughed around Floss, even though she was The Girl Who Laughs. Cassie doesn’t want to believe that Floss was not her person. When you’re twenty, and in love, the idea that that person will not be in your life forever can be soul-crushing to the point of stagnancy. Cassie waits and waits, but she never gets to move on. But deep down, she must still be there, because the branches are still rustling. She is still reacting to the world around her, in her own subtle way.
Jake’s story, too, is heartbreaking. Grief is experienced differently in every instance. One person can go through grief a hundred different ways through their lifetime. Two people living through the same awful event can react in wildly different ways. Jake and his father are affected deeply by the death of Holly and the loss of their home, but they push it down to the point of invisibility. The two of them are going through it in such different ways that it’s as if they’re living on two separate planes. They lose the ability to even see each other through the grief. Only when Delia tries to unite them can they even remember the other exists; only when Jake remembers what happened can the two of them see each other and start to heal together again.
Through my life, I have experienced heartbreak, grief; I have been afraid of change for most of my time on this Earth. Recently, though, I have found that I am excited for change in the future. I attribute a good portion of that to the medication I am lucky to be taking now, but it also comes with the wisdom awarded when you start to get older. This book is a beautiful encapsulation of the wide varieties of change, as well as people’s reactions to it. I think that it made me so emotional because, among other reasons, the changes that were brought about by the events of the story have helped every character grow and find more love and joy.
The world is not like this story. People do not suddenly turn into trees or lose entire walls. But it is a great reminder to stop and take stock of where you are and where you’ve been. It’s a reminder to remember all of the beautiful things you have available to you, whether it’s music, people, or the ability to find life and love in objects that others might overlook.
I hope that, because of this book, I see the world a little differently. I think that I will.
Total pages read so far, 2024: 10,307
Total books read so far, 2024: 28
Next book: What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama