Await Your Reply - Dan Chaon

Three interlocking stories, gripping characters, literary prose and DeLillo style paranoia – mix that up well and what you should have is a best seller. Right? Then why is Await Your Reply not flying off the shelves of my bookstore? It truly is a mystery to me!

Dan Chaon opens with one our three main characters, Ryan, bleeding to death in the passenger seat of a car, his now severed hand sitting next to him in a Styrofoam cooler. It’s a gruesome opening, but it was a good hook and kept me turning the pages but it didn’t necessarily mean that this novel was going to be great. I mean, after the first five minutes of Van Helsing I was convinced the movie was going to be fantastic but we all know what happened after that! (And don’t even tell me you went to see that movie for the “acting” – gratuitous breast shots? I’ll buy that…)

Thankfully, the book was quite enjoyable. There are three separate stories with distinct characters and settings. Fans of multiple points of view will eat this up. Our first character is Ryan, a middle class kid from Iowa who is in danger of flunking out of Northwestern University. While he has worked hard to please his parents, there is the distinct sense that he will never be the person they want him to be.

Second is Miles, a 30-something working at a mail-order magic shop in Cleveland. His whole reason for being seems to be the pursuit of his paranoid schizophrenic twin brother, Hayden, who went missing some 10 years earlier. This was perhaps the best of the three stories with Chaon skillfully showing the ongoing dysfunctional relationship between “normal” and mentally ill siblings.

Lastly, we meet George, a, middle aged school teacher in pursuit of getting rich quick and his love interest, Lucy, a runaway orphaned teenager in pursuit of a rich man. The thinnest of the three stories, George seems overly mysterious and the relationship he has with Lucy – sexual or otherwise - is more implied than fleshed out. While Lucy may not appeal to some, her listlessness and naivety are in stride with a girl of her age. It’s not that she follows George blindly, its just that she has nothing better to do.

Do not skim through any of these stories lightly. Chaon, like a magician, uses slight of hand to store little tidbits of information in every chapter which lead to solving the greater mystery of who these people really are and what exactly they are up to!      

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I have to admit that when I first saw Beat the Reaper on the bookshelf I wasn’t too interested in another “mob” type murder/mystery/adventure novel. I had heard a few blurbs about the book from other reviewers and booksellers, but I just didn’t think it was going to be entertaining enough to keep me reading.

Then I received an advanced copy of the paperback with a little note attached explaining that the movie rights had been bought by New Regency and they were eyeing Leonardo DiCaprio for the starring role. I’m not really a huge fan of DiCaprio but I decided the book must be entertaining if Leo was considering attaching his name to the project.

Within the first few pages I was totally hooked. Maybe it was all the gratuitous cursing (I was having one of those days myself). Perhaps it was the detailed explanation of how human arm bones function while our main character, Dr. Peter Brown a.k.a. Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, is in the middle of breaking one. Conceivably, it was the masterful way in which first time author Josh Bazell married the Godfather to St. Elsewhere without a prenuptial agreement.  

When we first meet Pietro Brnwa, he has taken on the role of Dr. Peter Brown in order to “hide” from his previous bosses. His misadventures as a hit-man for the mob have landed him in witness protection. While his efforts to keep a low profile have been met with some success, a patient arrives that could potentially become a threat to his cover. Faced with the fact that his location will probably be given up to the mob, he must choose to run or continue to save as many lives as he can before he himself meets the reaper.

Flashback scenes set up the duel life of our anti-hero – how he stumbled into contract killing while hunting down his grandparent's murderer, where the nickname “Bearclaw” originated, his love affair with a beautiful Romanian violinist and how he managed to throw his best friend out a window. There are also footnotes, which normally impede a fast flowing story, but here are instructional and serve as a tool for Bazell’s quick wit.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart, however. There are some grizzly scenes featuring sharks (yes, sharks…), bullet wounds, bludgeoning and my all time personal favorite hand to hand combat weapon …well, I’ll save that one for all you readers to figure out. Suffice to say the Physical Anthropologist in me absolutely adores Bazell’s wit and style and I was left with the overwhelming longing to have been the one “to think of that”!

Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

I was somewhat disheartened by the early reviews of Home Safe, several saying nothing more than the novel was “dull” or “did not speak to them”. Having faith in Elizabeth Berg’s talent, I scooped up this latest novel and set out on a mission to love this book.

Helen, a sometimes self-indulgent novelist and overbearing mother, finds herself alone and afraid after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Dan. She believes at first that she will overcome her grief and move on becoming better able to manage her life but instead finds her “feeling of disconnection and helplessness has grown worse month by month if not day by day.” Her resolve is shaken further when the one thing she seemed so sure of – Dan’s money managing skills – appears to be glorified when she learns her nest egg isn’t what it should be. This discovery jolts her into the cold reality that she may not have known her husband as well as she thought and that she must overcome her writer’s block with some urgency in order to pay the bills.

After the first few chapters, I must admit, I wanted to give up on the character of Helen Ames – a helpless widow who can’t even get through an interview at Anthropologie without allowing her self-doubt to get in the way of a possible, albeit small, success. I wanted to reach into the pages and smack her silly and then throw the book into the deepest recesses of my personal library.

But these are the emotions whether negative or positive that an author must evoke when writing any story of worth. My almost pure hatred of this weak, unconfident, meddling and childish character caused me to reflect inward– these are some of the traits I loath about myself on a bad day. Just when I thought I could not take one more inner reflection from Helen on her own failings, Berg did something wonderful – she made me start to feel empathy for this character as I imagined the loss of my own husband and what it would be like to never wake up beside him again, never see him smile or witness a sunrise together. Berg, in only the way she can write, takes hold of your hand and gently leads you down a path of sorrow to the hope at the end of tunnel. And there is hope for Helen!

While Helen may not be a likable character at first glance, readers will become fond her sincerity and perhaps find a bit of humor in some of her assessments – for example, calling the police instead of a plumber when a pipe bursts in her home. We may not agree with all of her decisions but her efforts toward personal growth are page turning. Her supporting cast of friends, family, students and adversaries are just as intriguing as Helen but not overpowering enough to take your focus away from her story. Instead, they lend perfect perspective and voice to her plight, asking the right questions, interfering at precise moments and ultimately pushing Helen, begrudgingly, out of her safety zone.

Lastly, though some women may find her weaknesses unattractive, Helen poses the question to “strong” women everywhere – Wouldn’t you like the men in your lives to make the decisions once in awhile? Wouldn’t you like to “unhitch” and let the man order dinner for you? Try it – you might find it to be very liberating.