t is the middle of the 20th century. Men and women exist in 1950s complacency, secure in their gender roles. Dr. William Percival Gaunt, a wealthy author of pop-philosophy tomes, sits in his study watching his wife Paula as she putters around the garden. He loves her, and thinks he knows her, just as she thinks she knows him.
Then, between one second and the next, the world changes beyond all recognition. Men perceive it as the sudden disappearance of every woman alive. Women perceive it as the sudden disappearance of every man. Each sex has been provided a world identical to the one that existed a second before, with the exception of an opposite gender. Each sex sees cars crash as their drivers vanish. Planes plummet earthward as their pilots disappear. Women pregnant with boys go flat as their fetuses cease to exist. All over the two worlds that have been wrought from one, families find themselves torn asunder. Civilization totters in both worlds as the infrastructure of society suffers beneath the loss of half the population.
Women seem to have it worse at first; this being a 1950s novel, the loss of all their men means a shortage of firefighters, mechanics, engineers and doctors. Cities all over America burn. But even as they organize, delegate work and start marshaling what remains ... their men plummet into nuclear war.
The way the gender wars were
No 50-year-old work of fiction dealing with gender roles can avoid dating itself, even if it might have been visionary for its time. The Disappearance is no exception. Though Wylie uses the basic story to present the thesis that men and women don't know each other nearly as well as they believe, and uses the unwilling separation of the Gaunts to give us a powerful look at a couple who thought they knew each other but were actually living on illusions and lies, he still can't entirely escape the preconceptions of his time ... a fact which, far from ruining the novel for today's readers, instead provides us with a time capsule of the way our thinking ran only a few short generations ago.
For instance, there's the sense that the women, as resourceful and strong-willed as they are, are nevertheless somewhat silly in being forced to take on the roles traditionally held by men. The self-appointed president dithers on, worrying about fashions, while an invading force of Soviet women is deterred in part by giving them fashion makeovers. Never mind that men start living in filth, and punching each other at the slightest provocation. Never mind that the ladies, despite their relative lack of practical skill at this point in history, ultimately handle their side of the disaster with much more grace. Never mind, even, that Wylie presents the occasional ditziness of his heroines as the result of their position in society, and presents strong arguments against the then-current belief that treated women as less capable than men. Sexism still peeks through, frequently.
There's also the novel's less than salutory treatment of homosexuality, which Wylie correctly says would flourish in the absence of an opposite sex. He still shows no sympathy for it, treating the men who practice it as silly and grotesque, and the women as mere sublimating play-actors. Readers may also wince at the book's treatment of blacks, which though an accurate depiction of the racial divide as it existed at that time, is nevertheless presented in terms (and details) that ring painful to today's ears.
Though character-driven, and often touching on that level, The Disappearance is also deeply concerned with ideas--so much so that it sometimes seems like a series of essays on society, sexism, consumerism, religion and the politics of its time. The protagonist, Dr. Gaunt, is a philosopher mostly so we can read his ruminations on such topics in their entirety. Wylie has persuasive ideas about how the separation of the sexes would affect their respective perceptions of such issues, and it makes sense to treat Gaunt as a mouthpiece ... but the man still comes off as a blowhard, as irritating as the book that surrounds him. It's still a fascinating read, even if it ultimately reveals more about its time than it does about the speculative phenomenon of its title.
