by JULIET WATERS

We all have our secrets. One of mine is that I’ve watched way too many reality game shows. The Amazing Race, however, is the one I’m least ashamed of, because, you know, it’s educational, and the concept is so simple. Send teams of Americans racing around the world. Sure, the producers design crazy challenges to humiliate them along the way, but these days just being American outside of America seems to be humiliation enough.

Lost and Found is the show’s trashier rip-off in Carolyn Parkhurst’s novel of the same name. Sent on a world-wide scavenger hunt, couples have been deliberately chosen because they harbour some Jerry Springer-type secret that producers hope will surface during the race. Whenever contestants are eliminated, an ice queen/bitch hostess named Barbara Fox informs them they have lost, then asks them what they have found. You can bet good money that the answer is never “my human dignity.”

The novel opens after the first contestants have already been eliminated. Brian and Mariah were a brother-and-sister team disqualified after Brian had a schizophrenic breakdown in a “museum of natural history in Quebec” that bears a striking resemblance to Montreal’s Redpath Museum. As Laura, the mother in the mother-and-daughter team, narrates it:

“We were looking for trilobites, but Brian became very agitated by a giant dinosaur skeleton that was on display, and he began to pelt it with trash from a nearby garbage can. He had to be forcibly removed from the premises. Afterward, Barbara found the two of them outside, sitting on the ground like children. Mariah was cradling Brian in her arms as he rocked back and forth unhappily. Barbara walked up to them—you have to give her credit for determination—and asked them her question. Brian looked up at Barbara, his face a frieze of misery. ‘I’ve found you’re a motherless dog,’ he said before Mariah waved the cameras away. I’d like to see how they’re going to edit that.”

Laura is naïve enough to believe the producers didn’t do a thorough enough background check on Brian, unaware as she is of what they know about her background. She has no fantasies of winning the million dollars and sharing it with her teenage daughter Cassie. In her fantasy they will be eliminated and when Barbara asks her what she’s found, “Cassie and I will look at each other and smile; I’ll reach out and touch her arm, or her hair, and she won’t move away. I’ll turn back to Barbara, and the cameras, and all the TV viewers of the world. I found my daughter, I’ll say. I found my little girl.”

This scenario is, however, pretty unlikely. Laura seems, from her narration at least, to be a decent enough person. But she has some major challenges as a mother. A year before, she failed to notice that Cassie was pregnant. Absorbed in a doomed Internet relationship, Laura figured her daughter was just putting on a few pounds. Laura’s also a very sound sleeper who failed to hear her daughter screaming through a solitary home birth upstairs in her bedroom.

I’m not sure if this says more about our society or Parkhurst’s skill as a novelist, but somehow it feels perfectly normal these days to believe that a few months on a reality television show will restore intimacy to an extremely damaged family. Parkhurst reminds us, however, that real intimacy tends to develop not by torturing characters but by humanizing them. Life has a tendency to be torture enough. Characters we would have to hate on television—two child stars trying to revive their careers, a born-again husband and wife who are “reformed” homosexuals, re-united high school sweethearts who quickly discover they despise each other—all seem fairly ordinary, when seen from the point of view of Parkhurst’s steady storytelling.

There are some things television does well and some things fiction does better. Lost and Found is a gentle reminder of what those things are.

Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst,
Little, Brown, HC, 304pp, $23.95