courtesy of adamhaslett.net
“Devotion,” one of the most moving stories in Adam Haslett’s collection “You Are Not a Stranger Here” (a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist) follows a brother and sister preparing for the arrival of a guest, a man for whom each has held a torch through years of separation. The man never arrives; the brother and sister quietly resume their evening alone. Guided by Haslett’s elegant prose, the story is a master class in understatement and restraint. We feel each sibling’s desire and disappointment more keenly than if either had thrown a plate or punched a wall.
Haslett’s breathtaking new novel, “Imagine Me Gone” (after 2009’s “Union Atlantic”), brings these strengths to bear on the story of a family riven – and bound – by mental illness. Told in alternating first-person chapters from the point of view of each family member, “Imagine Me Gone” glides over unfathomable depths of feeling.
Margaret, a young American in 1960s London, is shocked to learn that her British fiancé, John, has been hospitalized for depression. She has one chance to free herself from John’s demons, which are certain to return, but she goes through with the marriage anyway. The novel charts the long-term ripples of this decision in the lives of Margaret, John, and their three children: theatrical, worrisome Alec; steely, self-reliant Celia; and Michael, the eldest, who alone of the three inherits his father’s psychological suffering.
Michael is the novel’s gravitational center, drawing his family into a decades-long cycle of caretaking and frustration. He is hampered by constant anxiety, prone to self-sabotage. While his siblings grow into conventional adult lives, Celia as a social worker and Alec as a political journalist, Michael remains on the fringes, unable to channel his obsessions – with house music, and with the “trans-generational haunting” of American slavery – into a career. (That his fixation on slavery never quite makes sense, to his family or to himself, is perhaps the point: obsessions are not fueled by reason.) While Celia and Alec fumble toward long-term romantic partnerships, Michael fixates on one unavailable woman after another. A prescription for Klonopin saves him, for a time, from his mind’s state of constant emergency. In the way of all addictions, the drug becomes gradually less effective, yet no less necessary for daily functioning.
Michael’s chapters showcase an imagination that toes the edge of delusion. A series of letters to an aunt reimagines the family’s move from Massachusetts to England as an odyssey of disasters featuring dengue fever, white slavers, and a guest appearance by Donna Summer. A family therapy session is recounted as a military after-action review. Michael’s voice is frequently hilarious, but the laughs are backed with pity and unease.
The book’s late action derives from Alec’s last-ditch plan to save Michael, the outcome of which can be guessed from the book’s opening chapter. Alec’s idea – and his family’s consent to it – is so risky as to feel contrived, but it’s a testament to the desperate places family can take us, the uncalculated errors we make in the name of love.
“There is a limit,” Michael says to Alec, “… an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure.” Throughout “Imagine Me Gone,” Haslett does the tough work of affirming love, while acknowledging that some wounds run too deep for love alone to heal.
