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Summary
Summary
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?
When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him.
Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"- Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone , Haslett has reached another level."- New York Times Book Review
Author Notes
Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here , which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, and the novel Union Atlantic , winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize.
His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and he has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the PEN/Malamud Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Depression is passed down the generations in a tale of family struggle that becomes an intense celebration of art, language and life Repeatedly in Imagine Me Gone, troubled characters ask themselves how life can be at once so beautiful and so painful. The pain is the grief of loss, past and future, and the ordeal of daily life for those unable to imbue it with meaning. The beauty is the magnificence of nature, love and perhaps most of all art: music, with its power to still unhappiness by reaching "the note that the heart pines for", and language. All the characters are wordsmiths, who enjoy the sentences they create and have some belief that to find the right words to describe pain is to make it more bearable. Life illuminated in this way becomes so intense that a man about to kill himself can rejoice in the precariousness of existence: "How narrowly we all avoid having never been." This is the second novel by the prizewinning American writer Adam Haslett. Union Atlantic was a more overtly topical story set in the corrupt banking and military world of the US after 9/11, told in rougher prose. Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur. The novel opens with the suicide of Michael, who, in the hope of escaping his dependence on prescription drugs, has been taken to a small island off the coast of Maine by his brother Alec. We learn early on that their father, John, killed himself a decade earlier, and that this is perceived as John's troubling legacy to Michael. The narrative then leaps back to a childhood holiday on the same island where John, "spiffed up in one of his jaunty summer outfits", leads his children in a series of exhilaratingly dangerous coastal games. The story unfolds slowly in the present, with the scenes of fairly ordinary family life infused with the tense foreboding of expected death. Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs. John's wife, Margaret, speaks in homely language that's earthed in the present tense of the everyday. Michael is more self-consciously literary, often using parody to brilliantly comic effect. As a child, he sends his aunt a series of deadpan but increasingly ludicrous letters from their sea voyage to England, describing Alec's supposed abduction by a child prostitution ring as "a suboptimal outcome". Later, he fills in a psychiatric questionnaire and a loan deferral form with an account of his life that is all the more harrowing for being half-couched in the official language of state institutions. John, whose voice we await anxiously, is somewhere between the matter-of-fact public school Englishman he began as and a tragic lyric poet. For years, he has seen himself as fleeing a monster. At the moment of his death, he finds that he has become the hunter, while the monster "is the one sapped, and limping". His head rolls back and he sees "the face of the beast -- my face -- human after all". This is one of many scenes so painful that my two days of reading the book felt less like a reading experience than a life experience: two days of terror and loss. I was troubled by the question of whether there is something coercive about dragging the reader into the minds of the unhappy in this way. There is a social gain: it becomes easier not to blame the depressed or drug addicted for their states. But the reader, drawn into the depressed state, loses autonomy. And in literary terms, perhaps it's too easy to move with unhappiness; perhaps it does not leave enough room for ambiguity. But because John, dying, can rejoice in existing at all, because Michael in the depths of despair can enjoy the brilliant contortions of his own mind, the book manages to transform its pathos into something more complex. There is a lot about honour and care here: about what it means to honour and care for both ourselves and those we love. Haslett's prose, so finely adapted for each of the characters, seems to do just this, honouring the living and the dead and rendering life precious enough that Alec, falling in love, can find that the gift of the present moment "set me afloat, leaving me light-headed and close to joy". - Lara Feigel.
Kirkus Review
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 hibernationswhich exacerbate their constant money problemsonly 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What does it take to unravel a family? After a psychiatric hospitalization threatens to derail her life, Margaret relocates to the UK, then returns to the States as her husband, John, struggles to land stable employment. Their three children, Alec, Celia, and Michael, weather the ups and downs of a deceptively conventional upbringing until one disastrous night upends the future for them all. Haslett narrates this soaring, heartrending novel from the revolving points of view of each family member, plumbing the psychologies of his characters. The result is a polyphonic page-turner that slowly reveals its orbit around Michael, the eldest son. Michael's troubled psyche, an inheritance from his father, proves to be the troubling linchpin at the center of this intensely personal work. Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel Union Atlantic (2010). Definitely a writer to recommend to fans of Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Franzen, and Alexander Chee.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CURRENT STUDIES SUGGEST that a child with a depressed parent may be genetically predisposed to depression. The same may or may not be true for anxiety disorders. Tomorrow the findings could be slightly different, completely reversed or flatly disproved. The research can seem, forgive me, maddeningly fluid. For a novelist, though, this uncertainty is a gold mine: rich, thrilling, irresistible. Yet 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," which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But even in that book's longer stories, the author's strengths seemed somewhat constrained by brevity. The subject also factored into his first novel, "Union Atlantic," but with "Imagine Me Gone" - a book that spans almost half a century, two continents and five WASP-y voices - Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of the mind under siege. "Imagine Me Gone" opens with a forlorn tease of its ending, then flashes way back to introduce the cast and set in motion the events that will ultimately return them to the cryptic opening pages. There's Margaret, a "pushy" American who, upon learning her British fiancé, John, has been mysteriously hospitalized in London, demands an explanation from his doctor. "You could say his mind closes down," the doctor says of John's debilitating depression. "It goes into a sort of hibernation." John has battled this "beast" since childhood, and though he's buoyed for stretches in the book - he marries Margaret, fathers three kids, moves the family to the States - he ultimately concedes defeat. Then there's Celia, their only daughter, a strong and levelheaded youth counselor in San Francisco, and her younger brother, Alec, an idealistic journalist who frets about his mother, siblings, money, politics and just about everything else. Finally, there's capacious and tormented Michael, the eldest child, who has inherited his father's severe psychological instability and around whom the characters - and the whole novel - orbit. Michael is by turns charming and intelligent, manipulative and vulnerable. He finds transitory solace in women, Klonopin and, unironically, house music: "I just needed to be in the hurricane, in that storm blowing in from paradise, pushing skyward the wreckage of... the Jamaican dub masters and, yes, Giorgio Moroder and the German industrialists." After a string of tough breaks, he repairs to Michigan for a graduate program in African-American studies, then when that doesn't do the trick, he moves back in with Margaret near Boston. If his father's mind was given to hibernation, Michael's is the opposite, a compulsive consciousness that is raw and restless and, unless assuaged by medication or booze, at war with itself. He is prone to harrowing anxiety, which Haslett renders with manic urgency. He transcribes voice mail messages he might need later; he spins out disturbing fictions that feature Alec, sea voyages and sex trafficking. Michael's chapters are avalanches of language, deluded and exhausting chronicles that are often only metaphorically related to lived experience. An especially revelatory device in the book is Haslett's use of Michael's own writing - letters to an aunt, medical forms he's filling out, misguided grad student-y treatises on the slave trade. Here is some of his answer to a survey question about his daily caffeine consumption: "What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room." And here is some of his response to a form asking about prescribed medications, specifically Effexor: "When he asked about the work I did, I told him about music as the medium for the transgenerational haunting of the trauma of slavery, and how what I needed most was a research library, a Jstor account and three years of postgraduate funding. To be honest, I didn't care about the degree. I'm not an academic careerist. ... But it was hard to get at what needed to be done after eight hours of pleading with white liberals for the habitat of a frog." And here is some of his response to a "request for forbearance," specifically to a question asking about any other outstanding debts: "The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proved tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals." Michael fixates on his subjects with an all-consuming scrutiny. It's tempting to describe his scrutiny as blinding, but that would miss the mark. His vision is hyperacute, damningly relentless. Once he trains his gaze on an ex-lover, an obscure D.J. or his self-aggrandizing studies of the Middle Passage, he's enthralled by every detail he thinks he sees. Then he catalogs them. Then he offers the catalog up for analysis and advice. Then he ignores all reasonable advice and acts out in self-destructive ways. The effect is a character - a brother, a son, an ex-boyfriend - who so obstinately demands care that granting him anything less than undivided attention seems shamefully cruel. 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. If Michael is on the page, if his thoughts or actions are laid bare, there's a grueling sense of dread. If he's out of sight, if his thinking and whereabouts are unknown, the dread becomes all but unbearable. So when ever-protective Alec decides he should abscond with Michael to Maine and wean him off his prescriptions, the plan seems at once profoundly generous and almost certainly doomed. Even the tireless Celia is so taxed by their brother that she signs off on Alec's futile endeavor: "I wished I had the money to send Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. ... Maine in the off-season was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency." The outcome of the plan is inevitable and wrenching, only slightly diminished by its lack of surprise. Yet 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. Before John takes his own life, early in the book, he thinks: "It's impossible, what I'm trying to do. To say goodbye without telling them I'm leaving." But make no mistake, the novel's most rewarding surprise is its heart. Again and again, the characters subtly assert that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted. Whether it's a choice or a learned behavior or a genetic imperative of the species, our constant slouching toward compassion is a lucky obligation. Even when confusing or crazy-making, it's the higher calling of our blood. It's a responsibility, a relief. Even when it's difficult or terrifying or impossible, especially when it's impossible, the impulse to calm those we hold dear is an absolute privilege. BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author, most recently, of the novel "Remember Me Like This." The hero's mind is raw, restless and, unless assuaged by drugs or booze, at war with itself.
