JULY 2016 - AudioFile
Margaret, who is portrayed by Ellen Archer, has chosen to marry the emotionally troubled John, a decision that ultimately kills her dream of a sophisticated London life and leads instead to a dreary small-town existence. Her husband’s British urbanity supposedly charmed many—including her—into making accommodations for his failings, yet narrator Robert Fass inexplicably plays John as flatly mid-American. One of the couple’s three children, Michael, also comes to battle mental illness. But Fass’s Michael is fundamentally a carbon copy of John. However, when Archer voices Michael as he interacts with sister, she captures the anxiety he tries but ultimately fails to control. The premise of IMAGINE ME GONE promises emotional resonance, but misses in narration by the usually fine Fass mean the audiobook only somewhat delivers. K.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
The Barnes & Noble Review
If one gets nothing else from Adam Haslett's stunning novel — and there are freightloads of else to get — a new appreciation for the decisive place of Donna Summer in the history of late-twentieth- century music might be enough. Yes, Donna Summer: never again may she be underestimated.
The words above were in fact written while listening to "Our Love," a 1979 track that Haslett's indelible character Michael understands as the single origin of the great burgeoning of techno, instructing a youngster decades later, "It's the genealogy of what you already love." Michael is a fountain of anxiety, "hyper- articulate," a supercollider of thoughts, a conduit for the impossible flood of pain that runs through a society that has not begun to acknowledge the ever-bleeding gash in its middle that is the legacy of slavery. Michael devotes himself to collecting music on an epic scale, the more outré the better, and reading into what might be called the literature of legacy, Proust and Althusser and Audre Lorde and Marx ("As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living").
Imagine Me Gone fulfills its considerable ambitions. It touches greatness, and its seamless interleaving of the deeply personal with the widely collective is one reason. The character of Michael is another. Haslett suggests grief is passed to succeeding generations of a society by the same mechanism it is to individuals. In Michael both converge. He's a true head case — hurting, a perennial child in need of solace, and a preacher who seems in lonely possession of the one true religion: the truth he was bequeathed by his unhappy parents and the one that came through his headphones. In fifth grade, 1978,
I couldn't be certain what it meant to "Give Up the Funk," or "Tear the Roof off the Sucker," or why Parliament would title an album Mothership Connection. But I had my first secret joy at knowing that beyond the veil of the apparent, meaning ached in the grain of music. A joy accompanied by my first intuition that black people might know a thing or two about the need for that meaning — history being the culprit.
From his ears it enters his blood. He begins to bear a mortal guilt, bolstered by his music fandom and humanist education, over his discovery that his race caused another to so desperately need that meaning, one that could only be expressed openly in the music that mutated down the years from funk to disco to house. He believes music is "the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery." Of course, such a weight finally breaks him. The congenital burden of his father's manic-depression and a calamitous chemical dependence do not help.
Pulitzer-nominated Haslett (You Are Not a Stranger Here) has often used fiction to anatomize the ravages of mental illness, of existential despair. Here he accuses Big Pharma of cynically "curing" it primarily for the benefit of its own pocket. But he also acknowledges that no one has a much better idea of how to fix the unbearable sadness that can descend; he delivers a fine-grained map of the territory of chronic depression in the sections devoted to Michael's father, John, who has only momentary reprieves before being overtaken by the "monster" again. (In one of the book's multitude of striking aperçus John's wife, Margaret, remarks of the British ward to which John has been committed, "The light in that room was a kind of malpractice.")
Their other children are Alec and Celia, and each finds ways to hold in abeyance the family's heirloom anxiety — the latter by running obsessive wind sprints and becoming a psychotherapist to heal herself by proxy, the former by taking it upon himself to oversee his brother's withdrawal from drugs. But, notwithstanding Haslett's intention to use them to display the prismatic effects of their own flashes of originality (Celia drops a truism worthy of a T-shirt at least, "Love is an affliction or nothing at all"), they fade behind the bright light that is Michael. For he is both the intellectual center of this cerebral novel and its tragicomic relief, the author of several brilliant parodic set pieces. It is he who is most heartbreakingly real, even as he stands in for the missing conscience of a nation.
Haslett's peculiar talent is to fuse the high to the low, the sardonic to the profound, cultural critique to human feeling, to achieve a seamless, polished whole. Imagine Me Gone accomplishes a complex feat, bringing close that most distant personality, the socially detached depressive, while giving the specificity of his guilt tangible weight. Adam Haslett has a point to make, and emotions for us to feel. If you are a son or a daughter, a member of a society with a dark past, remember one thing: "What we ignore only persists." What we read, so long as it is beautifully written and filled with astonishing insight, persists too.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training. Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson
The New York Times Book Review - Bret Anthony Johnston
…too many fiction writers lean on conveniently traumatic back stories and oversimplified psychological causality to explain away, rather than complicate, a character's behavior. Thankfully, Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett's ambitious and stirring second novel, owns up to the complexity—and consequence—of what can and cannot be inherited. Haslett has written about mental illness before, most movingly in the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here…The subject also factored into his first novel, Union Atlantic, but with Imagine Me Gone…Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of the mind under siege…By putting the readers in the same position as Michael's family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel—the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation…This is a book refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they're awfully, awfully sad.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/25/2016
Here was the world unfettered by dread... The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency,” writes Michael, the eldest son of a tightly knit British-American family, when he receives his first dose of Klonopin. Pulitzer-finalist Haslett’s latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety. The book begins with the family as a nuclear unit, the narrative switching among the parents and the kids (Michael, Celia, and Alec), as a cure for Michael’s condition seems close. When tragedy undermines the unit, though, the search for an antidote takes on a new urgency, as Michael cycles through obsessions with music and girlfriends, and Celia and Alec attempt to keep their own relationships afloat. This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind. Occasionally, the narrative style (it switches among monologues, letters, and messages from the doctor’s office) feels stiff. But in Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (May)
From the Publisher
"Extraordinary. . . . Frighteningly tender. . . . Displays an order as natural as a tree branch in winter-lithe and achingly austere."—The Boston Globe
"The greatest of this novel's many strengths is Haslett's uncanny gift for inhabiting the consciousness of five enormously complex characters....Imagine Me Gone is not a traditionally plotted novel but a psychological character study, written with the kind of patient intricacy one associates with 19th-century realists like the Russian masters or George Eliot - or, in contemporary American literature, Jonathan Franzen (Haslett's former teacher).....Adam Haslett is a writer of prodigious gifts, the greatest among them a deep compassion for his most flawed characters, and the courage to go with them into the abyss and bring their stories back to us with uncommon grace and boundless empathy."—Ed Tarkington, Nashville Scene
"Haslett proves frightengly capable in capturing the sense of duty and purpose in spreading the gospel of a beloved band that's typical of the musically obsessed, and through the painful course of the novel, cuts a sharp figure of their hearts."—Dylan Owens, The Denver Post
"In his devastating and gorgeously written novel, Haslett hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing how anguishing psychiatric disorders can be."—San Francisco Chronicle
"[Imagine Me Gone] shifts confidently between heartbreak and cathartic laughter...with a calm, forensic mastery."—Wall Street Journal "20 Books that Defined Our Year"
"At once the most beautifully written and yet most harrowing novel of the year so far....Imagine Me Gone is that rare thing in fiction: a book that breathes fresh life into the oldest story of all, that of the dysfunctional family, and invests it with a powerful sense of the love that binds such families together, for good and ill."
—Chicago Tribune
"This book is tragic, no question - but it's also poignant, tender and funny."
—Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
"Succeeds on just about every level that a book can...It's a stunning novel, written with compassion, and it ends where it has to-Haslett is a fearless writer, refreshingly unafraid to confront darkness. That's not to say there's no light in Imagine Me Gone; it is, in the end, a book about love and about survival. And it's unquestionably one of the truest and most beautiful novels of 2016."
—Michael Schaub, LitHub
JULY 2016 - AudioFile
Margaret, who is portrayed by Ellen Archer, has chosen to marry the emotionally troubled John, a decision that ultimately kills her dream of a sophisticated London life and leads instead to a dreary small-town existence. Her husband’s British urbanity supposedly charmed many—including her—into making accommodations for his failings, yet narrator Robert Fass inexplicably plays John as flatly mid-American. One of the couple’s three children, Michael, also comes to battle mental illness. But Fass’s Michael is fundamentally a carbon copy of John. However, when Archer voices Michael as he interacts with sister, she captures the anxiety he tries but ultimately fails to control. The premise of IMAGINE ME GONE promises emotional resonance, but misses in narration by the usually fine Fass mean the audiobook only somewhat delivers. K.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-02-15
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents' engagement in 1963 through a father's and son's psychological torments and a final crisis. Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a "sort of hibernation" in which "the mind closes down." She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family's five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a "world unfettered by dread." As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.
