Monday, July 12, 2010

Another excuse to use the word "liminal"

A common motif of the coming-of-age novel is the protagonist's quest to understand who he really is, to form an identity he can comfortably inhabit, however scarred and battered it might be. But why must Our Hero limit himself to only one identity? Why not grab a handful?

So reasons one character in Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, which, like his earlier novel You Remind Me of Me, concerns a character trying to locate his lost brother (and perhaps find himself in the process). This time, though, the lost brother is not one person but many, a master of identity theft who borrows underutilized identities for his own ends. He persuades one of his disciples to do likewise, convincing him that "Most people...had identities that were so shallow that you could easily manage a hundred of them at once. Their existence barely grazed the surface of the world."

Chaon specializes in such liminal characters, people who exist on the edges of reality but struggle to break through into more meaningful lives. In his previous novel and short stories, most of the memorable characters are male, but in Await Your Reply Chaon presents a fully developed female character whose peril drives much of the suspense of the novel. Lucy's story is one of three separate tales whose connections become clear very slowly, culminating in a final revelation that is absolutely perfect but nevertheless arrives like a kick in the gut. Each storyline involves a quest--for self, for survival, for a lost loved one--that shifts at times into a life-or-death chase. Chaon controls pace and suspense masterfully, doling out hints that could portend real peril for beloved characters while always holding in reserve the possibility that the characters might be mad or simply mistaken.

Lucy seems sane enough, an intelligent teen who grabs the first ticket out of her bleak midwestern town. She soon discovers, however, that stepping into a new identity is not as painless as she had expected: "The life she had been traveling toward--imagining herself into--the ideas and expectations that had been so solid only a few weeks ago--this life had been erased, and the numb feeling crept up from her hand to her arm to her shoulder." This numbness creeps deeper as she careens down an unknown road seeking a city she has seen only in dreams:

Her future was like a city she had never visited. A city on the other side of the country, and she was driving down the road, with all her possession packed up in the backseat of the car, and the route was clearly marked on her map, and then she stopped at a rest area and saw that the place she was headed to wasn't there any longer. The town she was driving to had vanished--perhaps had never been there--and if she stopped to ask the way, the gas station attendant would look at her blankly. He wouldn't even know what she was talking about....In one life, there was a city you were on your way to. In another, it was just a place you'd invented.

Here Lucy resembles no one so much as Isabel Archer, who, in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, defends her preference for not knowing where she's going: "I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see--that's my idea of happiness." This strategy traps Isabel in partnership with a man made of lies, so it's not surprising to see Lucy drifting into a similar situation.

Will she escape, or will she finally succumb to the suffocating numbness? You'll have to read the book to find out.

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