The Book of Lost Friends

The novel’s ending affirms the importance of love and the need for others, braiding together both storylines separated by more than century. Both principal characters, Hannie and Benny, in coming to terms with their past, in making their peace with history, earn the right to happiness. The novel moves both toward that threshold of hope.

Hannie, through a series of coincidences and unexpected twists, finds her way not only back to her long-lost family and the beginning of a new family with Elam Salter. For her part, Benny saves her job, inspires her students, becomes a YouTube sensation and a celebrity in Louisiana’s public education system, and promises herself to begin the long and difficult reunion with her own daughter. The two characters, both struggling to understand their past, both tested emotionally and psychologically, now begin balanced and healthy lives. Hannie and Benny accept their scars and the legacy of their painful pasts; in turn they resolve to embrace their moment and its possibilities by accepting love, and ultimately they look forward tentatively but audaciously to beginning a new future.

The end of Hannie’s difficult journey in Texas begins with her decision not to return to Louisiana in the face of the dead-ends in her search for William Gossett. Hannie understands why the man, her hated former master, pursued his doomed trip to Texas. She understands that though William Gossett was a slave owner, an adulterer, a business schemer, was also a father. “What could bring him here into the wild?” she asks herself, knowing the answer. “Love. That’s the thing that would do it” (291). It is a moment when Hannie reveals the depth of her own heart and the hunger she feels in the decade-long separation she has endured from her family. She explains to Juneau, “Something was begun in me, way back when we stood in that little wildwood church and we looked at them newspaper pages” (292). Hannie is not complete without her family. Even as she learns the fate of her ex-master and watches him die an agonizing death, even as she confronts the outlaw bands of rogue ex-Confederate soldiers who terrorize frontier Texas, even as she survives a blazing gunfight, Hannie refuses to step back from her mission. Despite multiple warnings, she knows that somehow, someway, like those desperate people who put ads in the Book of Lost Friends, she would find her way home.

The character most instrumental in Hannie’s journey back to her family, ironically, is the man she believes for most of the novel is her nemesis. She assumes Moses is a mercenary hired by William Gossett’s lawyers to make sure she, Juneau, and Missy never return from their trip to Texas. She knows Elam Salter only as Moses. He is threatening, intimidating, muscular, scarred. He is the one who throws her off the ship early on in her journey. Despite his threatening demeanor, Hannie cannot forget the man: “That’s how Moses sneaks into my mind, never letting me know for sure, is he my friend or my enemy? I feel every inch of him against every inch of me. See his eyes, smell his scent” (290). The revelation that Moses is in fact a deputy federal marshal and has been in fact keeping an eye on Hannie and that tossing her overboard was the only way to protect her begins a transition in their relationship toward love. Salter’s wounding during the gunfight after the ambush compels Hannie to acknowledge her feelings for the man, her debt to his heroic presence. “Everything about him pulls me in and scares me at the same time” (323). Salter is grievously wounded in the leg. The doctors tell Hannie he may never walk again. It is a moment when the novel tilts toward despair. Being a marshal has given Salter purpose and identity and pride. The novel reveals only when Benny’s students open the time capsule that Hannie, in fact, married Elam Salter after her reunion with her family.

The romance between Hannie and Salter is paralleled by the romance between Benny and Nathan. In the closing chapters, Nathan moves to become part of Benny’s crusade to stage the class pageant. He opts to act, to fly back from North Carolina to intervene. In sharing with Benny the truths that his sister had unearthed, Nathan does two things: 1) he accepts the hypocrisy and immortality of his family and how his ancestors used a racist legal system in Reconstruction Louisiana to lay claim to a farm that was by rights Juneau’s inheritance; and 2) he understands that a person cannot live apart, cannot pretend that others somehow do not matter. In reading the tender handwritten note left by his sister and then working with Benny to recover the family records that verify Robin’s findings, Nathan affects a reunion of his own with the family he spent years pretending did not exist. In a novel about finding the way to a lost family, Nathan’s quiet epiphany in the Gossett mansion library while he studies the yellowed newspaper clipping that recounts his family’s legal maneuverings to cheat Juneau Jane marks his own emotional reunion with a family he had long denied.

Benny’s closing revelation about her own lost daughter that brings the novel to its close. A first-person narrator such as Benny is often expected to be candid and open, not secretive, cagey, and holding back truths from the reader. In the closing paragraphs, however Benny reveals what she has hinted at, a secret so emotionally devastating to her that she could bring herself to admitting it. As she tells LaJuna in encouraging her to begin the difficult journey of her own education, “It’s the hardest piece of reality to accept. Striking off into the unknown is terrifying, but if we don’t begin the journey, we will never know where it could lead” (373). Only a few pages later, when Benny confesses to the reader the truth about her daughter and promises when the time is right to locate her daughter and tell her she was never not loved, only then does the reader see that all the advice Benny has given as teacher applies to her own journey to reclaim her own lost family.

The novel does not reveal Benny’s fate. Rather the ending is open. Do Nathan and Benny find a way to the relationship they both feel so deeply they need? Does Benny continue to inspire the students in Augustine’s public school? Does Benny track down her long lost daughter? The novel then leaves Benny exactly where Hannie was at the beginning of the novel: uncertain, uneasy, anxious, certainly, but hungry for family and ready to hope again.