Sunday 10 July 2022

“Await Your Reply“ by Dan Chaon - review


 “Await Your Reply” by Dan Chaon:

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” And what if that story is a lie? 


Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?


This entertaining page-turner, focusing on fate, circumstance and family dynamics, is a gripping journey on the quest for identity and a meditation on what is what defines us and what happens when we loose it.


It all begins with a fast-paced gruesome, maybe a little too calculated cliff-hanger chapter that makes you realize right away you’re in for a rough ride. This feeling of unease and lurking threat never leaves. 


The book is composed of three strands of seemingly separate narratives. Their main protagonists are each driven by the desire to become someone else and each have a central need for someone’s unconditioned and complete love.


The first narrative is about Ray, a college dropout who feigns his own death and learns that the man he thought was his uncle and who recruited him for criminal activities involving identity theft, is really his biological father. 


The second narrative is about Lucy, an orphan who runs away from her dreary hometown and life in Ohio with George, her high-school history teacher. 


The third narrative is about Miles who, for almost a decade now, is in search of his twin brother Hayden, a paranoid schizophrenic, charismatic drifter who spent most of his life switching from one identity to the next and occasionally sends messages to his brother but refuses to be found.


For a long time, even though there seem to be similarities and parallels, these narratives don’t intersect until they do and then the novel gains enormous momentum and leads to a finale, stunning in its result and inevitability, as devastating as the opening cliff-hanger chapter of the novel. 


The book is written with an eloquence and grace of style not frequently encountered in the field of page-turners and a joy to read. 



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