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. 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.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.")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, and The 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 Barnes & Noble Review
…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.
The New York Times Book Review - Bret Anthony Johnston
★ 01/25/2016
"Extraordinary. . . . Frighteningly tender. . . . Displays an order as natural as a tree branch in winter-lithe and achingly austere."—The Boston Globe 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 Dylan Owens , The Denver Post 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" 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 Mary Ann Gwinn , Seattle Times 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
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
★ 2016-02-15
