Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The Barnes & Noble Review

Personal pronouns appear in many of the titles of National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon's work. In Fitting Ends, his first story collection, originally published in 1991 by Northwestern University Press and reissued by Ballantine in 2003, we go on "My Sister's Honeymoon," are told "Sure I Will," and asked "Do You Know What I Mean?" He called his first novel You Remind Me of Me -- more than 50 percent personal pronouns. Now the title of his masterful novel seems to address us with an edge of anxiety, combined with an Internet shyster’s come-on: Await Your Reply.

You and I: the questions of character and identity which form the heart of Chaon's fiction have fascinated him from the time of his childhood, when he first started wondering about the alternate life he would have lived he not been adopted. As he said in an interview with The Believer:

A lot of this stuff about fate and circumstance and choice is a personal obsession.... Choices that I didn’t know about changed my life in radical ways. I find that enormously profound.... Even simple choices can have huge consequences, and we never get to do things over! Of course, probably a big part of my fascination goes back to being adopted -- growing up with the sense that there’s another life out there that I might have had, or multiple lives.

As the father of two adopted children, and as someone who has puzzled over such matters since my own childhood, un-adoptive though it was, I know exactly what Chaon means. I didn't just wonder about why I was me and you were you, I was close to obsessed with such questions. What if my mother hadn't met my father? What if that girl in college had gotten pregnant? Who would my child be if my wife and I had applied for adoption a couple of months later than we did?

Almost all of Chaon's writing at its heart appears to dramatize his concern about such matters. And Await Your Reply addresses them more urgently and darkly than ever before. Its story, moving backward and forward in time, as this writer's stories often do, involves three sets of characters: Miles, who lives an anomic life in Cleveland and is sporadically driven to try to track down his twin brother, Hayden, whom he hasn't seen for ten years; Lucy, a high school girl who runs away with her charismatic and elusive English teacher, George Orson; and Ryan, who finds out he was adopted by his aunt and uncle and sets out to join his biological father, Jay, and eventually joins in Jay's financial-scam activities. The book must be read carefully, and sometimes events can be tricky to follow, but, with his structural precision, Chaon has earned the right to challenge the reader.

Await Your Reply begins with a short description of Jay driving Ryan to the hospital with Ryan's severed hand -- a grisly MacGuffin-style storytelling device -- resting on a bed of ice between them. The next short take shows Lucy, after she has graduated, driving away from Pompey, Ohio, with George Orson in the dead of night. In his typically businesslike but sharp prose, Chaon tells us, "This wasn't actually as bad as it might sound. Lucy was eighteen, almost nineteen…and her parents were dead and she had no real friends to speak of." The third opener shows Miles driving through northwest Canada on his way to Alaska, in pursuit of Hayden.

Three driving scenes. The vast expanses of the Midwest and Canada and the nowhere of Alaska will give way to the desert city of Las Vegas and the half-a-world-away nation of Cote D'Ivoire: Chaon shakes up his six central characters and throws them like so many dice onto the felt of his inventions. The alien quality of the settings, added to the no-man’s-land of cyberspace, which Chaon also explores, puts the central narrative questions into sharp relief. The first of those questions, as you may already have guessed, is whether these characters are all part of the same novelistic game. Pretty early on, you know the answer: Yes. Then the second question arises: How?

A thread of this carefully woven fabric is the fraudulence of half of each of the pairs here, and the ways in which they draw their son and girlfriend and twin into frightening, illegal, and sometimes lethal entanglements: forgery, credit card shell games, money laundering, murder. A deeper connection is the philosophical problems that lurk behind and hover above all the story lines. One is the effort to conjure with the contingencies and random events that determine all our lives -- the contingencies that Chaon cites in The Believer interview -- like Lucy's parents' death in an automobile accident. Another is to try to come to some conclusion about what identity really is -- if there is such a thing at all. (The Internet, which lends itself to depersonalization and imposture, has not changed these questions but intensified them.) A third is whether and how our lives can be said to matter. "People like to think that what they do actually matters," the increasingly scary George Orson says, with some disdain, to Lucy, whom he has lured further into his elaborate schemes and now asks to assume a new name. George may be a cynic about whether people and what they do matter, and he's a bad guy, but I can't help feeling some similar worries emanating from the author as well.

I can't reveal much more than that about the plot(s) without spoiling the elegant and sometimes mordantly funny surprises of Await Your Reply. You have to read the book -- especially if you're interested in a postmodern novel that, for all its meta qualities, still works on a visceral level because of the clarity of its prose, the tension of its narrative, and the psychological insight of its author. For example, all three "victims" here -- Ryan, Lucy, and Miles -- know on some level the ominousness of the territory they've chosen to enter. About Lucy, Chaon writes: "There was a lot he hadn't told her. But so what? It was that secretive quality that drew her to him.... Why deny it?" And of Miles, who has received a letter from Hayden after a long period of silence: "He shouldn't have even opened the letter, he thought later.... But no, no. By the time he had gone up the three flights of stairs, he had already torn open the seal."

If the book sounds like a mystery, that's because it is -- a panoply of mysteries, in fact. Does George Foster really have any money? Who is threatening Jay? Has Hayden, like Kilroy, been here -- or there -- or not? But Chaon's deepest mysteries in Await Your Reply are existential. And this novel is, like Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, one of the few I've read in the last decade that genuinely deserve and renew that largely debased adjective. As Chaon says, in The Believer interview, for him

the most interesting thing about writing is getting to a place where there is more mystery at the end than there was at the beginning. Often novels try to explain the world to you. That's something I'm not interested in. I'm interested in taking things that people have neat packaged ideas about and unwrapping them and making them more complicated.

I would give him more credit than that: complex, not complicated. Here is an author who, because he was adopted, in some ways has made himself up. We all do that, to one degree or another, but adoptees face this reality more directly than the rest of us have to. Chaon has written books and now a new novel in which -- by aesthetic definition -- he has made people up. And in many of these works the characters make themselves up. In Await Your Reply, they remake themselves into different people, and they involve others in their sinister mutability.

You're tempted to conclude that Chaon is implying that identity itself is a fraud, until you remember that there is indeed a solid and integrated consciousness in this book -- a still point in its turning world. I'm talking about the artist himself. As always with very good art, the artifact battles with silent eloquence against the chaos out of which it was formed. --Daniel Menaker

Author of the novel The Treatment and two books of short stories, Daniel Menaker is former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker. His reviews and other writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Slate.

From the Publisher

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.

Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

Here's what can be safely revealed about Await Your Reply: It contains three separate stories about people driving away from their homes, abandoning their lives and remaking themselves…Any one of these arresting plots could have sustained the entire book, but Chaon rotates through them chapter by chapter. Not only that, but the chronology of each story is jumbled so that the novel isn't so much cubed as Rubik's Cubed. I know that sounds like a literary headache, but these are engrossing, nerve-racking storylines that continually hand off to one another without breaking stride, leaving us as fascinated as we are disoriented…The result is a novel that succeeds as brilliantly as the short stories that have won him a National Book Award nomination, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…the real pleasure in reading Mr. Chaon is less in finding out where he's headed than in savoring what he accomplishes along the way.…Mr. Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Mr. Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre.

The New York Times Book Review - 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…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.

Publishers Weekly

Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award-finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut-also a book of threes-even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence. (Sept.)

Michelle Green - People

In the end, Await Your Reply is a story that unfolds with chilling precision. You'll be spellbound from start to finish. 4 stars)

Bette-Lee Fox - Library Journal

Miles Cheshire is driving from Cleveland to Alaska in search of his disturbed twin brother, Hayden, another leg of a crusade that has consumed him for more than a decade. Ryan Schuyler is 19 when he discovers that he is adopted and his real father, a con man who deals in fraud and identity theft, now wants Ryan to live with him. Orphaned Lucy Lattimore leaves town with her former high school history teacher when his dreams of riches and travel fill the hole in her life. This chillingly harsh work by Chaon (You Remind Me of Me) will make you question your own identity and sense of time. His characters live on the outskirts of society, even of their own lives. Yet we are compelled to read about them, driven to see it through. VERDICT This novel is unrelenting, like the scene of an accident: we are repulsed by the blood, but we cannot look away. For fans of pulse-pounding drama, Chaon never fails to impress. (With an eight-city tour; library marketing.) [See Prepub Alert, LJ5/1/09.]—Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

A sprinter who excels at the 100-yard dash may never attempt a marathon. A poet who composes haiku might not be able to sustain an epic. Though writers of short stories are almost invariably encouraged to become novelists-a contract for a debut story collection is typically a bet hedged against the longer work to come-some authors who master the former don't seem as well suited to the latter. Maybe it's a question of scope, or even artistic stamina, but the novel requires a different mindset. It isn't just a longer story. Ohio's Dan Chaon, whose two collections established him as one of America's most promising short story writers, returns this fall with a second novel, Await Your Reply, easily his most ambitious work to date. As in his stories and previous novel (You Remind Me of Me, 2004), this book focuses on family dynamics, the quest for identity and the essence of the Heartland-in some ways, Chaon is to the Midwest what Richard Russo is to the Northeast-but the structure has an innovative audacity missing from his earlier, more straightforward work. The novel initially seems to be three separate narratives, presented in round-robin fashion, connected only by some plot similarities (characters on a quest or on the lam, a tragic loss of parents) and thematic underpinnings (the chimera of identity). One narrative concerns a college dropout who learns that the man he thought was his uncle is really his father, who recruits him for some criminal activity involving identity theft. The second involves an orphan who runs away with her high-school history teacher. The third features a twin in his 30s in search of his brother, likely a paranoid schizophrenic who occasionally sends messagesyet refuses to be found. It's a tribute to Chaon's narrative command that each of these parallel narratives sustains the reader's interest, even though there's little indication through two-thirds of the novel that these stories will ever intersect. And when they do, the results are so breathtaking in their inevitability that the reader practically feels compelled to start the novel anew, just to discover the cues that he's missed along the way. The novel and the short story each aspire to a different kind of perfection. We think no less of Alice Munro because she reigns supreme in the shorter form (though her short stories are longer than most). We continue to hail William Trevor and Lorrie Moore primarily for the exquisiteness of their stories, though both have attempted novels as well (shorter than many). More recently, Donald Ray Pollock's hard-hitting Knockemstiff, a debut collection of interrelated stories, could have easily been marketed as a novel. And Aleksander Hemon's return to stories with Love and Obstacles could pass as a follow-up novel to his brilliant The Lazarus Project. With Chaon, one senses that there's no going back. His stories established his early reputation. He did that. Now he's doing this.

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Await Your Reply

Ballantine Books

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Excerpted from Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon Copyright © 2009 by Dan Chaon. Excerpted by permission.
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