I just finished reading Alice Lichtenstein’s novel, Lost, in one sitting. This story about three strangers whose lives intersect after a man with Alzheimer’s disappears one frigid morning is that compelling. From the moment I met Susan, the wife of the lost man; Jeff, a search and rescue expert; and Corey, a mute eleven-year old who’s been abandoned by his family after accidentally causing the death of his brother, I could not put the book down.

The reader sees this frozen rural world of Lost through the eyes of each of these people. I was struck by how authentic the three different worlds felt, an indication of Lichtenstein’s careful research. In a well-drawn flashback, Susan, who before early retirement to care for her architect husband, was a scientist doing cutting-edge research on the regenerative properties of salamanders, shows one of her graduate students how to step by step “pinch off a tiny amount” of Tillie’s brain. Tillie, Susan’s “rarest salamander, an albino axolotl with pink-fringed gills and a dumb, trusting smile.”

Lichtenstein is equally successful in taking the reader into the whole search and rescue experience. Over and over there are passages that make us believe in the expertise required in rescue work:

“Jeff drops to his belly, stretches his arm along the track as a gauge…If a man is lost, his dominant foot will point along the line he takes. And pitch angles will vary foot to foot. The dominant foot takes a slightly longer step than the nondominant foot…We circle our weak side, wheeling and wheeling, and never even realizing we’re doing so.”

Oh, as a reader I love it when a writer is so exact. Lost also takes us into the barn where Corey helps his grandfather fix the conveyor belt that cleans the manure from the gutter. Again Lichtenstein makes us feel like we’re “there” with her use of sensory images:

“Corey stepped on the black, sludgy tongue of the gutter, careful to fit the heel of his boot to the lip on the conveyor to keep from slipping back…He couldn’t get used to the smell, or the way it looked on the ground, puddles of horrible, dark pudding.”

And besides making the world real, many of the descriptive passages do the double-duty of metaphor, revealing so much about the interior lives of Corey, Jeff, and Susan.

I finished this deeply satisfying novel in the middle of the night. I think, with a good story, the reader is always hoping that the writer will be able to conclude with on ending that “works.” Of course, I am not going to give away that conclusion, but I can say that I was able to reach The End feeling that all my hours of reading landed me at a finish that felt absolutely “right.”