Long before brothers started fighting in the back of the station wagon, they got off on the wrong foot in Western civilization. By the time Freud described the murderous fantasies between fathers and sons, brothers had already been deadly antagonists for millenniums. When Remus mocked his brother's wall, Romulus killed him. When Abel upstaged his brother's sacrifice, Cain slew him.In the early 1940s, both East of Eden and The Skin of Our Teeth revived the Bible's first brothers, reenacted the murder, and won Pulitzer Prizes. Recent incarnations have been less contentious, but hardly harmonious. Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, Tim Gautreaux's The Clearing, and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing all show men struggling to restrain their violent brothers bent on self-destruction -- a kind of therapeutic remaining of the ancient myth.Dan Chaon's debut novel, You Remind Me of Me, makes a fascinating addition to this list. With deep insight and a fluid style that never calls attention to its considerable beauty, he's been earning accolades for his short stories up till now; his second collection, Among the Missing, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, and You Remind Me of Me pulses with the emotional intensity his fans have come to expect.The story follows the disconnected lives of two brothers, one given away for adoption at birth, the other mauled by their mother's Doberman at the age of six. Both these events -- traumatic in their own ways -- ricochet through a number of lives, creating a web of trajectories that tempt us to discern the direction and velocity of character. But even if you miss the stray allusion to "rosebud" from "Citizen Kane" late in the novel, it's clear that Chaon is writing about the irreducible mystery of human nature.He contributes to that mystery considerably in the opening chapters. Each begins with a specific date -- March 24, 1977; June 6, 1966; June 15, 1996 -- but the characters' names are sometimes held back and their relationships to one another are scrambled in a way that frustrates our efforts to place them.He may be presuming too much about the diligence of busy people trying to carve out 30 minutes of reading before bed. (I eventually drew several tangled genealogies on a piece of scrap paper. Chaos and consternation erupted when my daughter accidentally threw it out while setting the table.) But the fortunate readers who persist will come to see that this problem is emblematic of the challenge all these characters face as they struggle to organize their own lives, sifting through hopes and memories, visions of what they'd planned and realizations of what they've become.Jonah was a quiet, withdrawn boy even before his mother's dog killed him one Easter season. Revived by paramedics a few minutes later, he spends the rest of his life assuming that this attack was "what set his future into motion," but that explanation becomes increasingly inadequate. Perhaps, Chaon suggests, the key lies in his severely depressed mother and the sense of gloom she shed over his childhood. Or perhaps his personality was determined by the persistent fantasy of the lost brother, the idealized sibling who could have served as an enduring friend.In any case, Chaon is more interested in our desire to understand the harrowing gap between what we want to be and what we are. For Jonah's mother, that desire leads only to corrosive regret and self-pity. But for Jonah, permanently masked behind a thicket of scars, the dream of remaking himself remains a tantalizing possibility.When his mother dies, Jonah discards every possession, every remnant of his past, and sets out for a new city armed only with a copy of The Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success. Chaon describes this quest with poignancy and muffled wit. Jonah's habit of making up memories, designing for himself a more usable past, seems oddly touching. You don't have to be a fellow loser (or do you?) to sympathize with his practice of overanticipating events and rehearsing conversations before they take place. He draws up lists of his meager good qualities, he practices friendly gestures in the mirror, he watches happy people and imagines what it would be like to be them.His physical condition is peculiar and his mental state is a weird mixture of grief and optimism, but Chaon's portrayal of this hopeful loner strikes notes that will resonate with anyone who hankers for a new beginning, who vacillates between bouts of confidence and despair. "The true terror," Jonah thinks, "the true mystery of life, is not that we were all going to die, but ... that we once didn't exist, and then, through no fault of our own, we had to."His plan to remake himself depends on finding his older brother, the baby his mother spent her life mourning. We meet Troy long before Jonah does, first as a sweet adolescent slipping into drug addiction, then as an anxious father struggling to drop the habit and regain custody of his son. Unlike Jonah, Troy remains far less definite about the prime cause of his troubles, but he's just as determined to change his direction, to make something of himself.The eventual contact between these two brothers arrives in a fascinating, long-delayed crisis, fraught with expectations that Troy can't possibly satisfy for Jonah. The ghastly looking stranger who imagines the benefits of instant fraternity is bound to be disappointed, but Jonah has invested so much psychic energy in this great hope that he loses touch with reality rather than let go of his dream.Chaon sinks gently and quietly into these sad lives, but moments of real fright spike through his narrative, and the poignancy of Jonah's desire for connection shifts ominously toward much darker tones. Fortunately, this is an author of deep compassion. Not all his characters attain the insight they need to fathom their hopes and fears, but a few do, and his readers will come closer to understanding their own.Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor.
Midway through the book, one of the characters imagines writing a letter: Once upon a time there was a woman who had two sons. The first son she gave away when she was a teenager, and she regretted it for the rest of her life. The second son she kept for her own, and she regretted that even more. Now, that's a disturbing but compelling kind of situation to imagine, and if the book had started out there I probably would've devoured it much more eagerly.Instead, Chaon starts slowly and realistically with chapters ranging among Troy (the first son), Jonah (the second), and a few other POVs (their mother Nora, Troy's girlfriend/wife/ex, their son). We don't know who these characters are at first, nor how they're related, let alone why we should be interested in them. Jonah's ugly and dramatic encounter with his mother's pet Doberman is nowhere equaled in the rest of the book, though of course it leave a shadow and (literal) scars all over his later character.A little too often it feels like information is being deliberately withheld to create suspense. (And, yes, I chose to phrase that passively: there's absolutely no authorial presence, no sense of the narrator as a character, just a sourceless voice.) Each chapter's title is a specific date in one of four different decades (from the '60s to the '00s, but somehow skipping the '80s entirely), and the challenge of constructing a chronology and fitting all the events into the puzzle isn't rewarded with corresponding complexity and mystery of character.It's a good story triggering a lot of interesting thoughts about identity, nature vs. nurture, fatherhood and motherhood and brotherhood; the characters are pretty rounded and the plot is developed and resolved in satisfying ways. But I was always aware that I was reading a fiction, that all of this had been created and orchestrated for me, that these people would never be completely real.(I read the large print edition because that's what my library had.)
What do You think about You Remind Me Of Me (2004)?
Good but slow read. Difficult at times to keep track of events because there is a lot of jumping around chronologically. Worth the read, however, as you can get sucked in by the miserable circumstances these people live through. It's one that showcases how some lives are just lived with no real bright spots or great shining moments. Life is hard, but it can be exceptionally hard for some unfortunate souls. Some people just don't get a break.This story ties together the lives of a young pregnant teenager in the 60s, sent to a home for unwed mothers, a young boy savagely attacked by the family Doberman and left with terrible scars he will carry for the rest of his life, and a young father struggling to support his son and young cousin after his wife leaves him. Delves into the question of how different (better?) a person's life could have ended up if they started out with a different family.
—Dawn
This is a masterpiece! Chaon ranks with the very top of 21st century authors. His phrasing is felieitous and elegant. His plotting brilliant. The way he allows his stories to unfold, riveting.This book is about choices and if's. If someone had made a different choice, then what? They made a choice and what other choices do they then make and what happens to their lives and someone else's? Oh, this has been argued and reargued in philosophy and even psychology. Is it nature or nurture? Is it by design or sheer luck? How free is our will. Was it, as Nora says at the end, which is also the beginning: How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddering outward like sheet lightning?Yet what happens, what the characters do, are not necessary consequences of choices. This is far more complex than that. Luck? God's plan? Fate? Choices? They are not either/or's.Thhe voice is that of an omnisiscient author, and the sequences that unfold are not in chronological order, although each chapter is dated. The unfolding is like the ruminations in one's mind about what has happened in the past twenty years, memories jumping from one episode to another. Had this been written starting in 1971 and ending in 2002 in order of occurrences, it would have been interesting and the wording itself would have taken you along, but by fragmenting the time the motivations and consequences of what happens are made clearer, although we never really figure what is going to happen next, as in real live.Chaon's characters are fully developed real humans, down to their gestures. Not only does he portray people we can feel breathing, but he is a master at creating their umwelt, the world in which they act and act upon. His familiarity with the roads and geography of the Great Plains states serves him well as characters not only interact with their towns, but as they take to the road. Every shrub, weed, box of a house passes before our eyes. Jonah, Troy, and Loomis, the Dakotas, and Nebraska stay with you.
—Elaine
Wow, what a great book! My thanks to Doreen for lending it to me.For me, the book got off to a slow start, partly bacause I was travelling while reading it (and couldn't read it for any length of time)and partly becuase of the nature of the book (it moves between characters and times). There was - to begin with - no obvious connection between the characters. However, I was patient as I knew they would all come together eventually, and they did. Once they did, I couldn't put the book down!This book has powerful characters, ones that will stay with me for a long time. I became totally involved with them and their predicaments, and found my heart racing when they got themselves into difficult situations! For the second two thirds of the book, I didn't want to do anything else but read.What I also liked about the book was that it didn't sink into sentimentality: there was no 'quick fix' (everthing didn't work out happily ever after), yet there was a positive ending which left me very satisfied indeed. I would highly recommend the book to anyoneone who likes strong characters and a well constructed plot.By the way, the author's last name is pronounced "Shawn"!
—Aban (Aby)
