You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon won me over with his collection of short fiction, Among the Missing, so I decided to see if he was as good at novels as he was short stories. My journey into his book You Remind Me of Me was rather disappointing. It held the same realistic elements he had in his short stories, but in bulk reads as dragging and overdone. I often found myself wishing the book would just end already.

You Remind Me of Me is told through multiple characters’ perspectives. Jonah, a socially awkward young man looking for a brother his mother gave up for adoption before he was born, Troy, the brother who has lost his son due to a drug arrest, Nora, the mother of both, and Judy Keene, the grandmother of Troy’s son who seeks to keep the child away from Troy’s bad influence and redeem herself as a mother figure after her daughter’s decline into drug addiction.

It’s pretty heavy stuff.

Mostly, this is a story about four people who feel they have made too many mistakes in their lives, they all fantasize about what their lives might have been like had they made different choices, been born to different families, had better luck.

The concepts, the search for identity and the constant introspection of his characters is very beautiful and intriguing at first, but grows tedious and dull about halfway through. A lot of it ended up reading like filler, and I longed for some action between the long passages of inner thoughts.

It’s a deeply sad story, with little to no happy moments. By the end a lot of questions have yet to be answered and only Troy seems to have redeemed himself.

I also found it difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. Troy was a deplorable drug dealer, Jonah was on the overly self-pitying psychotic side, Nora was legitimately insane and grotesquely self-centered, and Judy was harsh and kept Troy’s son from him.

It was amazing, however, the distinct differences between Troy and Jonah’s muddled and self-pitying voices  and Nora’s clear, albeit crazy, voice. I often found myself wanting more chapters from Nora’s point of view, as her insights and feelings rang more interesting to me than Troy and Jonah’s.

I am not entirely turned off to Chaon’s novels and will probably try out his newer novel, Await Your Reply at some point in the future, but I would not recommend this book as your first taste of Chaon’s work.

Here is an interview with Chaon about his collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing and his novel You Remind Me of Me.

I notice whole passages of “You Remind Me of Me” that were strongly affected by some of the stuff I was listening to as I wrote, bands like Sparklehorse, Red House Painters, The Innocence Mission, Julie Doiron, Yo La Tengo, Idaho, The Eels. My kids call it “suicide music,” but I find it very inspiring.

                                      -Dan Chaon from interview in The Believer