Review by New York Times Review
CURRENT STUDIES SUGGEST that a child with a depressed parent may be genetically predisposed to depression. The same may or may not be true for anxiety disorders. Tomorrow the findings could be slightly different, completely reversed or flatly disproved. The research can seem, forgive me, maddeningly fluid. For a novelist, though, this uncertainty is a gold mine: rich, thrilling, irresistible. Yet too many fiction writers lean on conveniently traumatic back stories and oversimplified psychological causality to explain away, rather than complicate, a character's behavior. Thankfully, "Imagine Me Gone," Adam Haslett's ambitious and stirring second novel, owns up to the complexity - and consequence - of what can and cannot be inherited. Haslett has written about mental illness before, most movingly in the story collection "You Are Not a Stranger Here," which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But even in that book's longer stories, the author's strengths seemed somewhat constrained by brevity. The subject also factored into his first novel, "Union Atlantic," but with "Imagine Me Gone" - a book that spans almost half a century, two continents and five WASP-y voices - Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of the mind under siege. "Imagine Me Gone" opens with a forlorn tease of its ending, then flashes way back to introduce the cast and set in motion the events that will ultimately return them to the cryptic opening pages. There's Margaret, a "pushy" American who, upon learning her British fiancé, John, has been mysteriously hospitalized in London, demands an explanation from his doctor. "You could say his mind closes down," the doctor says of John's debilitating depression. "It goes into a sort of hibernation." John has battled this "beast" since childhood, and though he's buoyed for stretches in the book - he marries Margaret, fathers three kids, moves the family to the States - he ultimately concedes defeat. Then there's Celia, their only daughter, a strong and levelheaded youth counselor in San Francisco, and her younger brother, Alec, an idealistic journalist who frets about his mother, siblings, money, politics and just about everything else. Finally, there's capacious and tormented Michael, the eldest child, who has inherited his father's severe psychological instability and around whom the characters - and the whole novel - orbit. Michael is by turns charming and intelligent, manipulative and vulnerable. He finds transitory solace in women, Klonopin and, unironically, house music: "I just needed to be in the hurricane, in that storm blowing in from paradise, pushing skyward the wreckage of... the Jamaican dub masters and, yes, Giorgio Moroder and the German industrialists." After a string of tough breaks, he repairs to Michigan for a graduate program in African-American studies, then when that doesn't do the trick, he moves back in with Margaret near Boston. If his father's mind was given to hibernation, Michael's is the opposite, a compulsive consciousness that is raw and restless and, unless assuaged by medication or booze, at war with itself. He is prone to harrowing anxiety, which Haslett renders with manic urgency. He transcribes voice mail messages he might need later; he spins out disturbing fictions that feature Alec, sea voyages and sex trafficking. Michael's chapters are avalanches of language, deluded and exhausting chronicles that are often only metaphorically related to lived experience. An especially revelatory device in the book is Haslett's use of Michael's own writing - letters to an aunt, medical forms he's filling out, misguided grad student-y treatises on the slave trade. Here is some of his answer to a survey question about his daily caffeine consumption: "What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room." And here is some of his response to a form asking about prescribed medications, specifically Effexor: "When he asked about the work I did, I told him about music as the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed most was a research library, a Jstor account and three years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn't care about the degree. I'm not an academic careerist. ... But it was hard to get at what needed to be done after eight hours of pleading with white liberals for the habitat of a frog." And here is some of his response to a "request for forbearance," specifically to a question asking about any other outstanding debts: "The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proved tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals." Michael fixates on his subjects with an all-consuming scrutiny. It's tempting to describe his scrutiny as blinding, but that would miss the mark. His vision is hyperacute, damningly relentless. Once he trains his gaze on an ex-lover, an obscure D.J. or his self-aggrandizing studies of the Middle Passage, he's enthralled by every detail he thinks he sees. Then he catalogs them. Then he offers the catalog up for analysis and advice. Then he ignores all reasonable advice and acts out in self-destructive ways. The effect is a character - a brother, a son, an ex-boyfriend - who so obstinately demands care that granting him anything less than undivided attention seems shamefully cruel. By putting the readers in the same position as Michael's family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel - the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation. If Michael is on the page, if his thoughts or actions are laid bare, there's a grueling sense of dread. If he's out of sight, if his thinking and whereabouts are unknown, the dread becomes all but unbearable. So when ever-protective Alec decides he should abscond with Michael to Maine and wean him off his prescriptions, the plan seems at once profoundly generous and almost certainly doomed. Even the tireless Celia is so taxed by their brother that she signs off on Alec's futile endeavor: "I wished I had the money to send Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. ... Maine in the off-season was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency." The outcome of the plan is inevitable and wrenching, only slightly diminished by its lack of surprise. Yet this is a book refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they're awfully, awfully sad. Before John takes his own life, early in the book, he thinks: "It's impossible, what I'm trying to do. To say goodbye without telling them I'm leaving." But make no mistake, the novel's most rewarding surprise is its heart. Again and again, the characters subtly assert that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted. Whether it's a choice or a learned behavior or a genetic imperative of the species, our constant slouching toward compassion is a lucky obligation. Even when confusing or crazy-making, it's the higher calling of our blood. It's a responsibility, a relief. Even when it's difficult or terrifying or impossible, especially when it's impossible, the impulse to calm those we hold dear is an absolute privilege. BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author, most recently, of the novel "Remember Me Like This." The hero's mind is raw, restless and, unless assuaged by drugs or booze, at war with itself.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What does it take to unravel a family? After a psychiatric hospitalization threatens to derail her life, Margaret relocates to the UK, then returns to the States as her husband, John, struggles to land stable employment. Their three children, Alec, Celia, and Michael, weather the ups and downs of a deceptively conventional upbringing until one disastrous night upends the future for them all. Haslett narrates this soaring, heartrending novel from the revolving points of view of each family member, plumbing the psychologies of his characters. The result is a polyphonic page-turner that slowly reveals its orbit around Michael, the eldest son. Michael's troubled psyche, an inheritance from his father, proves to be the troubling linchpin at the center of this intensely personal work. Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Union Atlantic (2010). Definitely a writer to recommend to fans of Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, and Alexander Chee.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Here was the world unfettered by dread... The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency," writes Michael, the eldest son of a tightly knit British-American family, when he receives his first dose of Klonopin. Pulitzer-finalist Haslett's latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John's abiding depression and anxiety. The book begins with the family as a nuclear unit, the narrative switching among the parents and the kids (Michael, Celia, and Alec), as a cure for Michael's condition seems close. When tragedy undermines the unit, though, the search for an antidote takes on a new urgency, as Michael cycles through obsessions with music and girlfriends, and Celia and Alec attempt to keep their own relationships afloat. This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind. Occasionally, the narrative style (it switches among monologues, letters, and messages from the doctor's office) feels stiff. But in Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents' engagement in 1963 through a father's and son's psychological torments and a final crisis. Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a "sort of hibernation" in which "the mind closes down." She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernationswhich exacerbate their constant money problemsonly to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family's five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a "world unfettered by dread." As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
