JULY 2016 - AudioFile
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
The Barnes & Noble Review
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.
The words above were in fact written while listening to "Our Love," a 1979 track that Haslett's indelible character Michael understands as the single origin of the great burgeoning of techno, instructing a youngster decades later, "It's the genealogy of what you already love." Michael is a fountain of anxiety, "hyper- articulate," a supercollider of thoughts, a conduit for the impossible flood of pain that runs through a society that has not begun to acknowledge the ever-bleeding gash in its middle that is the legacy of slavery. Michael devotes himself to collecting music on an epic scale, the more outré the better, and reading into what might be called the literature of legacy, Proust and Althusser and Audre Lorde and Marx ("As Marx tells us, the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living").
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.
Pulitzer-nominated Haslett (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.")
Their other children are Alec and Celia, and each finds ways to hold in abeyance the family's heirloom anxiety — the latter by running obsessive wind sprints and becoming a psychotherapist to heal herself by proxy, the former by taking it upon himself to oversee his brother's withdrawal from drugs. But, notwithstanding Haslett's intention to use them to display the prismatic effects of their own flashes of originality (Celia drops a truism worthy of a T-shirt at least, "Love is an affliction or nothing at all"), they fade behind the bright light that is Michael. For he is both the intellectual center of this cerebral novel and its tragicomic relief, the author of several brilliant parodic set pieces. It is he who is most heartbreakingly real, even as he stands in for the missing conscience of a nation.
Haslett's peculiar talent is to fuse the high to the low, the sardonic to the profound, cultural critique to human feeling, to achieve a seamless, polished whole. 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, andThe 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 New York Times Book Review - Bret Anthony Johnston
…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.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/25/2016
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)
From the Publisher
Praise for Imagine Me Gone:
"Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization and a limber, unpretentious style. Perhaps his rarest gift is the apprehension of the invisible connections that tie people together...The chapters seamlessly negotiate the passage of time...[Oldest son] Michael comes to dominate the narrative, and Haslett perfectly captures the qualities that make him both seductive and infuriating. He is a motormouth with a fitful imagination and a wicked sense of humor; his nervous energy and 'ceaseless brain' are the battery power on which the whole family runs...Haslett is alert to the reality of others, and the insinuating power of this novel comes from its framing of mental illness as a family affair. Michael's siblings are both wholly convincing characters, shaped by the abiding question of how much, or how little, they are meant to act as their brother's keepers...Most affecting of all is Margaret, who is treated with impatience by her children but possesses a capacious understanding...'What do you fear when you fear everything?' Michael wonders. 'Time passing and not passing. Death and life....This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.' That condition, Haslett's superb novel shows, is an irreducible part of the fabric of Michael's family, as true and defining as the love that binds them."
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of a mind under siege . . . By putting the readers in the same position as [oldest son] 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 . . . 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 . . . 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 . . . 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, New York Times Book Review
"Imagine Me Gone brilliantly captures the excruciating burden of love and the role it plays in both our survival and our destruction. Haslett suspends a sense of dread over you like an anvil from page one, cutting the rope that holds it in the brutal last act. You'd be a fool to look away."
—Julia Black, Esquire
"A richly drawn, Franzenesque canvas . . . Haslett's prose shimmers as he peers unflinchingly at the risks and rewards of fighting for love."—O, The Oprah Magazine
"A devastating family drama . . . Haslett's considerable skills as a writer turn domestic conflicts into something more profound . . . In one beautifully rendered scene after another, Haslett shows the family dealing with John's illness and Michael's descent while also managing their own conflicts . . . Imagine Me Gone is a handsome work . . . the sort of writing that is guaranteed to turn heads."—Michael Magras, Miami Herald
"Searing . . . Devastating and gorgeously written . . . Pure genius . . . Haslett hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing just how anguishing and time-consuming psychiatric disorders can be, not only for the afflicted but also for the flailing loved ones trying their damnedest-and failing-to find a suitable fix . . . Haslett writes with his eyes wide open about the pitfalls of piled-on medication, the panicked late-night phone calls, the cycles of fear, frustration, and guarded hope. And herein lies the kicker: Because these chapters are told from the alternating perspective of each of the five family members, we believe every word in them and bear witness to just how complex and multi-angled the issue of mental illness can be . . . By signing on with Haslett and his characters we are given the chance to look beyond our minutiae and daily distractions in order to notice the passage of time as experienced by others. We are reminded of what it is like to be truly, if fleetingly, alive."—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
"Powerful . . . Imagine Me Gone is a study of destructive family dynamics akin to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children or Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast. Family here is a trap as filled with love and concern as it is with exasperation and dread. Moving with penetrating wit between the points of view of a father, mother, daughter, and two sons, the novel traces how the vein of mental illness running through this family affects every member . . . Haslett, as he turns the narrative over to first one and then the other, is uncanny in nailing how their differences in personality and temperament guide their respective actions . . . His sharp take on how minor family foibles become conflated with major family dysfunction introduces some unexpected comedy into the proceedings . . . Haslett expertly evokes family behavioral patterns that simply repeat themselves, taxing everyone's patience, before precipitating into panic-inducing crises . . . With its fugue of voices, each contributing a vital slant to the action, Imagine Me Gone offers rigorous formal pleasures. Yet while flirting with narrative artifice, Haslett stays keenly aware that in this family there is no explanation 'sufficient to account for the events . . . Lives weren't works of art.' In acknowledging that, Imagine Me Gone respects the mystery of how things happen the way they happen, while brilliantly conjuring the tide-like pull with which dreaded possibilities become harsh inevitability."—Michael Upchurch, Boston Globe
"Drawing vivid scenes and compelling characters from a tragic realism, Haslett intimately connects the reader to his characters' inner lives . . . A rare, complex story [with] exceptional storytelling and poignant insights [and] uplifting moments of humor, kindness, and love."
—Don Oldenburg, USA Today
"An extraordinary blend of precision, beauty, and tenderness . . . Haslett's prose rises to the challenge, lushly capturing the dense fog of depression that blankets John [the father] and occasionally lifts just enough to reveal the 'beast' moving in on him. But Haslett really shows his chops channeling [oldest son] Michael's amped-up voice . . . I got caught up in the beauty of Haslett's sentences and the lives of these oh-so-human people bound by shared duress and cycles of hope. Haslett's signature achievement in Imagine Me Gone is to temper the harrowing with the humorous while keeping a steady bead on the pathos. You want sympathetic characters? You want a narrative that showcases love as a many-splendored thing capacious enough to encompass stalwart, long-suffering spouses, loyal siblings, suffocatingly obsessive crushes, and casual, noncommittal relationships (both gay and straight) that morph as if by magic into soul-sustenance? You want writing that thrums with anguish and compassion? It's all here."—Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Smart and polyphonic...Haslett is that rare writer whose art can console without ceasing to be art."
—Boris Kachka, New York
"Adam Haslett's brilliant second novel captures two troubled minds with rare empathy, realism, and insight . . . [Oldest son] Michael is an utterly enchanting character . . . His every riff on music, feminism, and racism is seductive to the reader . . . It's a memorable, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking trip."—Mark Athitakis, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Haslett's second novel depicts, with candor and tenderness, a family's struggle with the effects of mental illness . . . Especially moving is Haslett's ability to anatomize the ways that a family contorts itself around one member's struggles."—The New Yorker
"Haslett's second novel is a potent tale of love and loss . . . By its heartbreaking conclusion, we've come to know intimately the joys and struggles of each member of this troubled family."
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC
"An ambitious book about music, anxiety, and a family determined to stick together after fracturing loss, Imagine Me Gone is proof that realistic stories have immense power."
—Maddie Crum, Huffington Post
"Expansive and precise."
—Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"Compelling . . . An achingly realistic portrait of a family sucked into-and dry by-a mentally-ill loved one's spiral into darkness."—Jenny Comita, W Magazine
"There are some books, and this is one, that grab you in the first paragraphs and don't let go, even when the last page has been read. Haslett is certainly not the first novelist to broach the topic of depression...But he's done so with such a fresh voice and playfulness of form...that the resulting novel begs a reevaluation of how we view and cope with tragedy."
—Keziah Weir, Elle
"Michael is an exceptional character...Haslett is especially adept at depicting the obsessive male psyche in the midst of a meltdown. But as this is also a series of deft vignettes of paternal, maternal and filial love, you too will likely be moved to recall your family with a new fondness and understanding.
—Edward Nawotka, Dallas Morning News
"A moving novel about how love and frustration shape the family dynamics of those affected by psychological instability . . . [Oldest son] Michael emerges endearingly precocious and quirky, recalling the children of J. D. Salinger's short stories . . . Imagine Me Gone is a character novel to be savored for its complex and empathetic portrait of family. Michael is a compelling character, witty and heartbreaking. This is not a novel driven by plot but by its relentless tides of sorrow and hope. Like his family, you'll soon see the inevitable end but only read faster as it hurtles closer."
—Kelsey Ronan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Stunning...Beautifully written and filled with astonishing insight...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...Haslett's particular talent is to fuse the high to the low, the sardonic to the profound, cultural critique to human feeling, to achieve a seamless, polished whole. Imagine Me Gone accomplishes a complex feat."
—Melissa H. Pierson, Barnes & Noble Review
"Although depression and anxiety are foes that many authors have explored in the pages of literature, it is hard to think of a novel that presents as nuanced and intimate a portrait of these diseases as Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone. Told from the perspectives of each of the five members of the family, the novel offers a shockingly raw portrayal of how mental illness afflicts individuals as well as families, sometimes tearing them apart but also binding them closer. But to simply label this as a book about depression-however expert its portrayal-minimizes what Haslett has achieved. At its core, this is a pensive examination of the very human struggle to connect and find peace-with others and with ourselves-and the nature of time and how it passes. Haslett's keen eye for and rigorous examination of the intricate messiness of family dynamics calls to mind Jonathan Franzen's twenty-first-century masterpiece on intergenerational dysfunction, The Corrections, although Haslett's approach, while at times playful, is ultimately more tender and sympathetic. Imagine Me Gone is immensely personal and private, yet feels universal and ultimately essential in its scope. In its pages, Haslett has laid bare the agonies and ecstasies of the human condition and the familial ties that bind. The end result is a book that you do not read so much as feel, deeply and intensely, in the very marrow of your bones."—Stephenie Harrison, BookPage
"In this moving novel, Haslett explores how the profound depression of one person reverberates through an entire family. This beautiful, tragic, engrossing depiction of a web of emotional fault lines should win Haslett an even wider readership."—National Book Review
"We come to know the family at the center of Adam Haslett's powerful new novel as intimately as if they were our own . . . Imagine Me Gone is the story of this family across the decades-a family that is bonded and riven and bonded again by mental illness . . . [Oldest son] Michael is the center of the novel and certainly Haslett's most original character . . . For the reader, as for his family, Michael is strangely dear, utterly maddening, and ultimately heartbreaking."—Tom Beer, Newsday
"Moving and courageous."
—Danielle Groen, National Post
"With skill and subtlety... Imagine Me Gone sweeps the reader into its characters' worlds and makes us reflect on our own lives. It might be the best American novel about a middle-class family since Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections."—Max Lui, The Independent UK
"Haslett deftly explores the many different shapes and forms that depression can...his strength lies in encapsulating the darkness that enshrods the main characters' brains by making tangible the hopelessness that depression often induces in its victims...Imagine Me Gone paints a brand new, innovative picture of depression that demands to be felt."
—Mila Gauvin II, The Harvard Crimson
"A book everyone can identify with . . . Adam Haslett has described a family that is true, funny, and tragic. Imagine Me Gone is beautifully conceived and composed."—Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun
"Imagine Me Gone is a family saga reminiscent at times of Anne Enright's The Green Road. It is raw, tender and hilarious. In the writing of Michael, the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted Haslett lets rip to dazzling effect: a family therapy session, related by Michael in the form of an Army incident report, is a showstopper. But the voices of the novel's other narrators are equally involving, and the psychological insight piercing. True, the emotional demands are considerable. But the investment more than pays off."—Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail UK
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-02-15
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 hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only 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.
