Books: You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon

Lovable losers

By John Ziebell

With two short story collections, Dan Chaon has earned a reputation as one of the few writers who can be stylistically elegant, hilariously insightful and truly weird on the same page. Those pleasures are not lost in Chaon's first novel, You Remind Me of Me, but the book--at its most basic level, the tale of two biological brothers whose lives eventually intersect as adults--also exhibits a richness of structural sophistication and character development that short fiction, however brilliant, simply can't demonstrate.

It's perhaps too easy to say that You Remind Me of Me is about damage, both physical and psychological, but trauma is a central concern. Nora, the unwed mother of two sons, can't correlate her fantasies with a life that provides only disillusionment. Troy, her first child, cannot escape the fact that he was put up for adoption by a mother he never met; Jonah, the second, is savagely mauled by Nora's Doberman at 6 and grows up bearing not only the physical scars but memories of Nora's belief in her inadequacy as a parent, marked by abuse, instability and finally suicide.

The narrative shifts back and forth across three decades to follow the stories of its major characters. Nora, troubled child of the '60s, cannot reconcile the son she gave up with the one she kept, an emotional schism she never overcomes. Troy, a congenial stoner trapped without much future in rural Nebraska--a bartender, ironically enough, at the Stumble Inn--wants to be a good father to his son, but is so overwhelmed by circumstance that his life is constantly unreeling just beyond his control. Jonah is an outcast of his own making, a stalker not of happiness but of happy families, trying to live an idealized version of what childhood should have been; he exists in a psychological whirlpool, swept up in fictional autobiographies that he tailors to each new person he meets.

Chaon is a marvelous short story writer--a National Book Award finalist, as a matter of fact--and the elements of this novel have the kind of precision that very good short stories do. Chapters have a solid feel, and briefer passages have the balanced presence of polished vignettes; there's no abruptness or confusion in the transitions, even with a narrative that visits 30-odd years of varied histories.

The novel's language never leaves us hanging, but our investment in the characters does. This is where Chaon really shows his chops. No matter how bizarre things might become as the story progresses, the characters are invariably believable and unique. What's amazing here, as in Chaon's short fiction, is how he can change us as readers, reforming our perceptions over a matter of pages to favor the accidental felon and the socially inept loner, blue-collar victims so painfully crippled by lost pasts, indistinct desires and limited critical facilities.

Troy and Jonah might be losers, but they're our losers. Despite their stereotyped trailer-home lives and three-strike predictability, with every fated step each adds to his ongoing chain of errors, we never lose empathy for them. Quite simply, we side with them because they're the cultural repository of hope; at their level, the only true need is to function as part of a family, a role based on intangible emotion. Real love and real confusion are not mutually exclusive. People who have their shit together in this world operate with agendas from behind shields of calculation, and it's the self-righteous that we come to loathe, the well-intentioned busybodies whose well-intentioned meddling invariably goes astray. How often can you feel okay when a loving grandma, a retired schoolteacher at that, drops dead in her front yard? Forgive me, but that's real genius.