Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon's (2009)

Of course, books written since the new millennium are good, too...Chaon is well known for You Remind Me of Me, but I'm not familiar with that one.





This novel is a wonderfully taut, efficient thriller, the kind you can't stop reading even when it's getting late and you should really go to bed. It has the most immediately riveting first page I've ever read: Ryan is on his way to the hospital, his father telling him over and over he's not going to bleed to death. And then this short paragraph:

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan's severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

It'll take many more pages to get the full story, and the payoff will be worth it.


Three central characters' lives intertwine: Miles, a schlub who's always looking for his strange twin brother Hayden; Lucy, a high-school girl who runs off with her history teacher; and Ryan, a college student who fakes his own death to become a full-time con man, or as one character calls it, "the ruin lifestyle."

In searching for his brother, Miles meets on a woman on a similar search for her sister. She comments, "'But who just abandons their family in that way? What kind of person decides that they can throw everything away and--reinvent themselves. As if you could just discard the parts of your life that you didn't want anymore.'" In many ways this is the central question of the book: investigating just how and why and who makes such a decision, and to what extent people can discard their old lives. Or not.

One snag in the book is that Miles's brother Hayden, around whom the other characters orbit, is hard to swallow if you think about it. We're meant to believe that on the one hand, he's an obsessive, paranoid, nightmare-ridden loner, AND a charming, smooth, identity-shifting con man. Chaon tries to reconcile it by having the con man personality be a front that Hayden can keep up only for so long, but I just don't think it works that way. However, this is a snag that occurred to me only after I'd had a chance to sleep on it, and it sure didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

Wonderfully suspenseful, spine-tingling, beautifully constructed, and highly recommended.