Gone

Gone plays a hide and seek game between desire and loss in the hills of upstate New York. The narrative alternates between the first person, sometimes stream-of-consciousness voice of Stella Vanderzee, a California freeway flyer with an unfinished dissertation on Sylvia Plath, and letters written by Judith (Juju) Vanderzee, Stella’s aunt and the one-time lover of Stella’s mother. Stella receives these letters from an old family friend early on in the novel and then loses them before she has a chance to read them.

The plot centers on Stella’s search for an inheritance, a Homer painting supposedly left to her by her rich paternal grandfather, a legacy that never existed. Unaware that the painting is gone before her search begins, Stella sees it as compensation for the loss not only of her idyllic childhood in small town America, but also of her mother, the one-eyed multi-media artist Barbara Salzmann, who, Stella believes, committed suicide.

As Stella, accompanied by her lover and former student, the beautiful opiated Skip, resolutely seeks what she believes is hers, her beliefs and assumptions, about her grandfather’s mistreatment of her mother and her mother’s failure as an artist, about sexuality and desire, are juxtaposed with the history recounted in her aunt’s unsent, unread letters. What Stella sees/doesn’t see becomes intertwined with the alternative version of her artist mother presented in Juju’s “communications,” as well as questions about art, perception and possession. Gone is an attempt to give form to what has been lost—the pastoral past, the feminine body—even as that attempt is inevitably the undoing of what it retrieves.

"Interspersed with Stella's drink-and-drug-fueled monologues are letters from her Aunt Judith--usually to people Judish knew at best peripherally. The letters, which are given to Stella, who almost immediately loses them, are the best part of the book. Judith's voice is entirely convincing...."

—Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Gone contains the most compelling cast of cows in current fiction, and its featured humans are also tasty to ruminate over....Sheffield’s novel explodes the possibility of recovering, or even understanding, the past despite the still-tender ache of its wounds.  Gone is a wickedly funny, beautifully intricate, and unexpectedly moving journey into the unknowns of any and every life."

—Greg Bills