Tag Archives: Dan Chaon

Await your Reply by Dan Chaon

Posted on June 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

Await Your Reply was the last of Dan Chaon’s work available for me to read. I’ve reviewed his other works, Fitting Ends, Among the Missing, and You Remind Me of Me on this blog as well.

Await Your Reply follows three distinct storylines all revolving around the same theme: identity. Miles Cheshire is searching for his schizophrenic twin brother, Lucy has just run off with her history teacher, and Ryan has dropped out of college to live with the father he had been led to believe was just an uncle. It is unclear almost to the very end how these characters connect to each other, though how they resemble each other is made extremely clear from the first few chapters.

Each character is given an opportunity to remake themselves, to become a different person. Miles struggles with this, unable to be anyone other than who he really is, while Ryan becomes many different people through fake bank accounts and identities. Lucy is pushed by her history teacher lover to take on new identities though she is hesitant.

The stories themselves were engaging (though some more than others, I often found myself wishing Miles would shut up already about his lost brother so I could see how things were going with Lucy in that abandoned Lighthouse Motel she’s forced to live in). The underlying theme of identity felt heavy-handed in many parts, and I often felt like telling Chaon to cool it already, we get it. It also felt as if Chaon merely scratched the surface of “identity” in this novel and that he could have taken the theme to much deeper levels but chose not to for the sake of keeping this novel moving more like a mystery novel than an existentialist one.

While the novel is rather quick-paced and engaging, it’s also deeply sad. Each character is unbelievably lost in not only the world but within themselves. Each pushed by a person in their life (Miles’ brother, Lucy’s lover, Ryan’s father) to be someone they aren’t, to change into someone new. And while they all are unhappy with who they currently are, there isn’t really anyone else they would rather be.

There a few twists and turns towards the end of the novel, but I’ll leave those for you to discover yourself. If you are new to Dan Chaon, I would suggest reading his collection of short fiction Among the Missing and this novel.

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Review: Fitting Ends, collection by Dan Chaon

Posted on April 27, 2010 | 1 Comment

I went on a serious Dan Chaon kick and ordered all of his books. That is why after this one I will have written three reviews on his work. I promise this is the last one. I am moving on. His collection Among the Missing was amazing and everything else I have read has been pretty boring. 

Fitting Ends is a collection of short fiction, much of which is very reminiscent of his novel You Remind Me of Me, which I reviewed last week. His story “Do You Know What I Mean?” is about a rather nutty young man who tracks down his biological mother. Many of the details he uses in this story (a home for unwed mothers, taking them for ice cream and giving them pretend wedding bands) also show up in his novel with a similar character who is an unwed mother in that same home. 

Because of the many similarities in his stories to You Remind Me of Me, it was hard not to feel as though I was reading his notes he compiled before writing the novel. 

I wish I could say there were some stand out stories that really caught my attention, but there weren’t. It’s surprising how one author can write such a beautiful collection of stories and then have the rest of his work be so disappointing. 

This collection features the story of a frat boy who causes one of his brothers to be mentally disabled after a car accident and how all he thinks about is that no one seems to like him. Another is the story of a boy whose gay brother comes home for a visit and thoroughly bothers him, another is about a man in financial trouble who follows his boss one day and mugs him, and the title story is about a guy whose brother was a delinquent and then gets hit by a train and dies. 

All of the stories have similar themes: they are about characters who have come to a point in their lives when they realize they are over the hill. Most of his characters are pretty young- early twenties to early thirties, but they still all have a sense of having made poor decisions in life and are now realizing that they must live with these decisions. Decent enough theme but just not portrayed well enough for me. All of his stories were just too flat for me. 

Once again, my suggestion is to read his collection Among the Missing, and skip the rest. 

The next review will be of a science fiction novel called The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

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You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon

Posted on April 19, 2010 | 1 Comment

Dan Chaon won me over with his collection of short fiction, Among the Missing, so I decided to see if he was as good at novels as he was short stories. My journey into his book You Remind Me of Me was rather disappointing. It held the same realistic elements he had in his short stories, but in bulk reads as dragging and overdone. I often found myself wishing the book would just end already.

You Remind Me of Me is told through multiple characters’ perspectives. Jonah, a socially awkward young man looking for a brother his mother gave up for adoption before he was born, Troy, the brother who has lost his son due to a drug arrest, Nora, the mother of both, and Judy Keene, the grandmother of Troy’s son who seeks to keep the child away from Troy’s bad influence and redeem herself as a mother figure after her daughter’s decline into drug addiction.

It’s pretty heavy stuff.

Mostly, this is a story about four people who feel they have made too many mistakes in their lives, they all fantasize about what their lives might have been like had they made different choices, been born to different families, had better luck.

The concepts, the search for identity and the constant introspection of his characters is very beautiful and intriguing at first, but grows tedious and dull about halfway through. A lot of it ended up reading like filler, and I longed for some action between the long passages of inner thoughts.

It’s a deeply sad story, with little to no happy moments. By the end a lot of questions have yet to be answered and only Troy seems to have redeemed himself.

I also found it difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. Troy was a deplorable drug dealer, Jonah was on the overly self-pitying psychotic side, Nora was legitimately insane and grotesquely self-centered, and Judy was harsh and kept Troy’s son from him.

It was amazing, however, the distinct differences between Troy and Jonah’s muddled and self-pitying voices  and Nora’s clear, albeit crazy, voice. I often found myself wanting more chapters from Nora’s point of view, as her insights and feelings rang more interesting to me than Troy and Jonah’s.

I am not entirely turned off to Chaon’s novels and will probably try out his newer novel, Await Your Reply at some point in the future, but I would not recommend this book as your first taste of Chaon’s work.

Here is an interview with Chaon about his collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing and his novel You Remind Me of Me.

I notice whole passages of “You Remind Me of Me” that were strongly affected by some of the stuff I was listening to as I wrote, bands like Sparklehorse, Red House Painters, The Innocence Mission, Julie Doiron, Yo La Tengo, Idaho, The Eels. My kids call it “suicide music,” but I find it very inspiring.

                                      -Dan Chaon from interview in The Believer

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