Among the Missing by Dan Chaon
Published 2001 · 277 pages · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Among the Missing to read?
Among the Missing scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Clear contemporary American prose.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Controlled sentences with psychological precision.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of loss and absence.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Each story efficiently establishes world.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Stories work through implication and withholding.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The missing, absence, and memory carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Chaon maintains controlled distance.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Stories end unresolved; the missing remain missing.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Story collection with thematic unity.
How Among the Missing is regarded
Among the Missing holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.