Multiple Lives
By Lucinda Rosenfeld
Readers be warned: Before sitting down with Dan Chaon’s ambitious, gripping and unrelentingly bleak new novel, you might want to catch a “Seinfeld” rerun or two. Jerry and the gang’s quips will be the last laugh-lines you’ll get for a while. The book opens with a Northwestern University dropout named Ryan — one of three alienated main characters — shivering in the passenger seat of a car, his severed hand sitting next to him in a Styrofoam cooler.
The misery and suffering continue from there.
“Await Your Reply” — it’s a strangely benign title for a very un-benign book — features drownings, car accidents, hangings, arson, deaths by freezing and by toxic fumes, torture and suspicious heart attacks. All that’s missing is a mauling by a Doberman pinscher. (Though, for the record, Chaon — who will never be accused of writing “domestic novels” — began his 2004 novel “You Remind Me of Me” with just such a mauling.) What’s more, all the characters are morbidly depressed and, if still breathing, seriously considering altering that fact. Since the action takes place largely in the sleepy towns and cities of the Midwest (with side trips to Ecuador, the Ivory Coast and Arctic Canada), I felt at times as if I were watching an unfunny Coen brothers movie. By Page 200, I was also completely hooked — a credit both to Chaon’s intricate and suspenseful plotting and to some of the most paranoid material to hit American literature since Don DeLillo’s “White Noise.”
The book is essentially three separate stories that link up in the final pages. Ryan of the Severed Hand, a middle-class kid from Iowa, is in danger of flunking out of college when an identity-thief-cum-new-age-pothead, Jay, contacts him to say that Ryan is adopted and that he (Jay) is his real father. Ryan feels as if his whole life until now has been a fraud, and he nihilistically joins Jay in his criminal ventures, most of them conducted via computer from a cabin filled with beer cans and candy wrappers in the woods of Michigan. Ryan’s parents, meanwhile, believe their son has committed suicide and conduct a funeral, which Ryan reads about on the Web. In Chaon’s telling, Ryan feels both sorrow and liberation at his own “death” and subsequent rebirth under the assumed identities of various (stolen) “virtual” avatars. As Chaon writes, “He had been traveling away from himself for a long time now, he thought — for years and years, maybe, he had been trying to imagine ways to escape — and now he was actually doing it.”
In the second story line, Miles, a lonely man in his 30s working for a mail-order magic operation in Cleveland, lives in pursuit of his charismatic, paranoid schizophrenic identical twin brother, Hayden, who vanished some 10 years earlier — and possibly murdered their mother and stepfather. Here, Chaon deftly shows us how a mentally ill sibling, even one in absentium, can continue to dominate the “normal” members of his family, preventing them from getting on with their own lives. Objectively, Miles realizes that Hayden is insane and past the point of rescue or read option into mainstream society. Yet Miles is never entirely convinced that Hayden’s conspiracy theories are hokum. What if Goldman Sachs really is out to kill him? Chaon nicely handles Miles’s childhood recollections of his brother — and shows how Hayden, despite his delusions, outwits Miles at every turn, even when discussing his illness. “Oh, spare me,” Hayden says at one point. “Is that what Mom told you? That I became a so-called schizophrenic because I couldn’t handle Dad’s death? I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on your intelligence, but really. That’s so completely simple- minded.”
In the novel’s third and least convincing story line, Lucy, an Ohio girl of modest means who has just finished high school, runs away with her mysterious, Maserati-driving history teacher, George, in pursuit of a new start and the vast riches he promises to secure them. But the George-Lucy plot never comes to life as the others do, because, for one thing, Lucy is a confusing character, at once hopelessly naïve (in her blind faith that, without any effort, a giant fortune will suddenly appear) and wise to the point of jaded. Regarding her disillusionment with their fugitive hideaway — an abandoned Nebraskan mansion and deserted motel next to a dried-up lake — Chaon notes, “She’d had an image of one of those seaside sort of places that you read about in novels, where shy British people went and fell in love and had epiphanies.” Really?
Chaon also repeatedly tells us how special George makes Lucy feel. “She loved the way it felt to be with him, that easy, teasing camaraderie, that sense he gave her that the two of them, only them, had their own country and language, as if, as George Orson used to tell her, they’d known each other in another life.” But there is little evidence of that closeness, physical or otherwise. Presumably, sex would play a large role in why a listless teenager, even one who has just lost her parents in a car crash and who didn’t get into college, would shack up with an older man. Yet we hardly see the two of them touch. Nor does their conversation produce any sparks. Instead, it has a stilted quality that I was never entirely sure Chaon intended. “George,” Lucy asks at one point, “is there a problem?” Elsewhere, George says, “There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me.” Do people speak like this?
In other instances, Chaon’s prose can be sharp and biting. Regarding the old woman who owns the magic shop where Miles works, he writes that, even at 93, she “had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half.”
The underlying premise of Chaon’s book seems to be that, in the modern world, identity has become so fluid as to no longer necessarily exist. This will not be news to students of 20th-century French poststructuralist theory. But it is rare to see the position worked into a novel, the very existence of which would seem to throw this equation into doubt. (Do narratives not require “characters”?) Yet Chaon mostly pulls it off. As George explains to Lucy before the book’s cinematic denouement, complete with Russian mobsters: “It always comes to this. Everyone gets so hung up on what’s real and not real. . . . There isn’t just one version of the past, you know.”
Without giving too much away, not all the characters in “Await Your Reply” are who they appear to be in the beginning. The title itself derives from the notorious e-mail frauds in which a stranger from sub-Saharan Africa requests the recipient’s aid in securing a lost fortune in gold. Being spam, the message is of course addressed to no one and everyone, making the invariably formal subject line (“Await your reply”) particularly disingenuous.
But the author doesn’t limit his assault on the idea of “I” to the prestidigitations of the wireless world. In an interview promoting his previous book, Chaon discussed his childhood feelings about his own adoption: “Generally, I was very comfortable with the idea, though I did wonder, sometimes. . . . I was sometimes aware of the sense that there was an other life out there that I might have led, or even multiple lives.” The assessment is fairly neutral. Yet in “Await Your Reply” and in Chaon’s earlier novel — in which a suicidal mother neglects her younger son, having never recovered from giving up her older one while she was still a teenager — Chaon seems to be advancing the controversial position that adoption is a tragedy for all involved: the mother who never stops grieving; her remaining children, who bear the brunt of that grief; the adopted child who can never really know him or herself; the adopting parents who are invariably betrayed. Chaon is a dark, provocative writer, and “Await Your Reply” is a dark, provocative book; in bringing its three strands together, Chaon has fashioned a braid out of barbed wire.
Purchase at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Await-Your-Reply-Dan-Chaon/dp/0345476026
© Copyright, 2011 Main Street Magazine/Rain Enterprises
As seen in the January Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises
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