Spoiler alert. (Not that every comment I make on a book does not contain a spoiler... but who am I kidding? I am the only one who reads the book notes, so why shouldn't I put spoilers into what is essentially my book diary?)
This book does not end well. Perhaps it's a little "pop" of me to want a positive resolution to a story. And, really, as can be evidenced of my reading habits, I do not insist on such things. (Heck, I even enjoyed the ending to Waugh's A Handful of Dust which is about the most horrific conclusion I could ever imagine.) But it seemed like some kind of (tiny, tiny) uptick was called for at the end of The Ministry of Special Cases and we didn't get it. Everyone ends in this kind of ruined, insane denial. I suppose that's the point, really. When someone is "Disappeared" by the government, there is no way ever to truly know what has happened.
Clearly this novel is channeling Kafka's The Trial, though really only when the characters actually visit the Ministry of Special Cases. There's a scene where the mother is directed through the halls of the building and it rises to a level of absurdity almost identical to the scene in The Trial where the protagonist tries to find the attic-based judiciary offices. I can't imagine Englander wasn't intentionally comparing the two, but I also suppose that this Kafka absurd terror has a become pretty basic authorial tool and it's possible to emulate it indirectly rather than directly. Heck, we actually have a word for it: kafkaesque. How many other authors get their own adjective?
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