Adam Haslett Imagine Me Gone Reading Group Discussion Question
Fiction
'Imagine Me Gone,' past Adam Haslett
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IMAGINE ME GONE
By Adam Haslett
356 pp. Piddling, Brown & Company. $26.
Current studies suggest that a child with a depressed parent may be genetically predisposed to depression. The aforementioned may or may not exist true for feet 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 dorsum stories and oversimplified psychological causality to explain away, rather than complicate, a graphic symbol's behavior. Thankfully, "Imagine Me Gone," Adam Haslett's ambitious and stirring 2nd novel, owns up to the complexity — and consequence — of what can and cannot be inherited.
Haslett has written near mental illness earlier, most movingly in the story collection "You lot Are Not a Stranger Hither," which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But even in that volume'southward longer stories, the author'southward strengths seemed somewhat constrained past brevity. The subject also factored into his first novel, "Union Atlantic," just with "Imagine Me Gone" — a book that spans virtually one-half a century, two continents and five WASP-y voices — Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous delineation of the heed under siege.
"Imagine Me Gone" opens with a forlorn tease of its ending, then flashes manner back to innovate the bandage and prepare 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 caption from his doctor. "Y'all could say his mind closes down," the doc says of John'south 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 volume — he marries Margaret, fathers iii kids, moves the family to the States — he ultimately concedes defeat. Then at that place's Celia, their simply girl, a stiff and levelheaded youth advisor in San Francisco, and her younger brother, Alec, an idealistic journalist who frets nigh his female parent, siblings, money, politics and just about everything else.
Finally, in that location'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, business firm music: "I but 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." Afterward a cord of tough breaks, he repairs to Michigan for a graduate programme in African-American studies, and then when that doesn't practice the trick, he moves back in with Margaret near Boston.
If his father'due south listen was given to hibernation, Michael's is the opposite, a compulsive consciousness that is raw and restless and, unless assuaged past medication or booze, at war with itself. He is prone to harrowing feet, 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 linguistic communication, deluded and exhausting chronicles that are often only metaphorically related to lived feel. An specially revelatory device in the volume is Haslett'south use of Michael's ain writing — letters to an aunt, medical forms he'due south 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 e'er found almost comforting nearly these forms is the trace of hope I go as I'chiliad 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 dissonance 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 most music every bit the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed well-nigh was a inquiry library, a Jstor account and 3 years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn't care about the degree. I'm non an academic careerist. . . . But it was difficult to go 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 abstinence," 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 mode that the claret of slavery tends to run articulate 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. In one case he trains his gaze on an ex-lover, an obscure D.J. or his self-aggrandizing studies of the Eye Passage, he'south enthralled by every item he thinks he sees. Then he catalogs them. Then he offers the catalog up for assay and advice. Then he ignores all reasonable advice and acts out in cocky-destructive ways. The effect is a character — a blood 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 every bit Michael's family unit members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: Nosotros 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 only unbearable. So when ever-protective Alec decides he should abscond with Michael to Maine and wean him off his prescriptions, the plan seems at one time profoundly generous and well-nigh 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 transport Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. . . . Maine in the off-flavor was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency." The outcome of the program is inevitable and wrenching, only slightly diminished past its lack of surprise.
Yet this is a volume refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with night and winning humor, poignant tenderness and sentences then astute that they elevator the spirit even when they're awfully, clumsily distressing. Before John takes his own life, early in the volume, he thinks: "It's impossible, what I'm trying to do. To say bye without telling them I'm leaving." But brand no mistake, the novel'due south most rewarding surprise is its middle. 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. Fifty-fifty when it's difficult or terrifying or impossible, peculiarly when it's impossible, the impulse to at-home those nosotros hold dear is an accented privilege.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/books/review/imagine-me-gone-by-adam-haslett.html
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