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!