You Remind Me of Me - Hardcover

Chaon, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345441419 ISBN 13: 9780345441416

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2004

Synopsis

With his critically acclaimed Among the Missing and Fitting Ends, award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes the Chicago Tribune, who can “convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so.” Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel.

You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award, which was also listed as one of the ten best books of the year by the American Library Association, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as being cited as a New York Times Notable Book. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and won both Pushcart and O. Henry awards. Chaon teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

Already recognized as a gifted short story writer, Chaon has been compared to such luminaries as Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson, and Russell Banks. In crafting his first novel, Chaon’s short story sensibility pops up from time to time, particularly in the pacing and fragmented structure. Yet despite its jumpiness, the structure remains tightly focused on the characters. Chaon remains, both as a novelist and short-story author, an illuminating, haunting, and inquisitive writer. His skillful narration always centers You Remind Me of Me on two things: the search for family and, just as importantly, the accompanying search for self.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Adult/High School–This first novel focuses on the disparate lives of a fragmented family as they struggle with the harsh realities of poverty, depression, and dysfunction. The story opens with Jonah, a troubled, self-involved boy in a small South Dakota town. Raised by a depressed and suicidal mother who never wanted him, he survives an attack from the family's Doberman only to be severely scarred on his face and hands. Jonah develops into a lonely and isolated man who tries to make connections with anyone willing to befriend him, only to push others away by eventually demanding more than they want to give. Driven by his need for acceptance, Jonah seeks out an older half brother who was given up for adoption at birth. Troy, a bartender and occasional marijuana dealer, has difficulties of his own: shortly after the disappearance of his wife, he is arrested and placed on probation and house arrest for drug dealing. He struggles to regain custody of his son, Loomis, a strangely intelligent and watchful boy, from his uncooperative mother-in-law and has little time for the hopeful Jonah. In what he intends as a gesture of brotherly friendship, Jonah kidnaps Loomis, meaning to take the boy to Troy. This desperate act ultimately leads to the dramatic yet real conclusion. A series of tightly interwoven flashbacks; deft handling of structure; and simple, precise language transform these characters' lives into a story that is highly readable, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About a third of the way through Dan Chaon's remarkable first novel, You Remind Me of Me, a 6-year-old boy named Loomis Timmens is abducted from his grandmother's backyard on a sunny June morning in 1997. In a more conventional narrative, this is where the plot would kick into overdrive. We would get a blow-by-blow account of the police investigation, an unsparing portrait of the increasingly anguished parents, perhaps a broader portrait of the community in which the nightmarish event occurred. The mystery would propel the book relentlessly forward, toward a clear-cut resolution.

Chaon does something much more interesting. He devotes a couple of pages to the initial search for Loomis, then abruptly backtracks four years to fill in some background on Nora Doyle, a mentally unstable woman who gave up her first child for adoption in 1966. Then he hops forward three more years to chronicle the journey of Jonah Doyle, Nora's second child, from Chicago to St. Bonaventure, Neb., where he hopes to meet a man named Troy Timmens. According to documents Jonah has received from an investigative agency called PeopleSearch, Troy is "Baby Boy Doyle", the child the unwed 16-year-old Nora believed she was in no position to raise and had abandoned for his own good 30 years earlier. Troy, a bartender and small-time pot dealer, also happens to be Loomis's father.

For the next 100 or so pages, Chaon methodically chronicles the peculiar convergence of Nora's two sons, the one she raised and the one she gave up for adoption. Jonah, an emotionally needy, socially awkward man whose face is disfigured by scars -- as a boy, he was attacked and almost killed by the family dog -- decides not to confront Troy directly. Instead he worms his way into his brother's life, finding work in the kitchen of the restaurant where Troy tends bar, interrogating mutual acquaintances, showing up at Troy's house unexpectedly with bags of groceries. To explain his sudden appearance in a backwater town like St. Bonaventure, Jonah creates a heart-rending fictional biography for himself, telling his co-workers that he's trying to start a new life after surviving a tragic car accident that killed his pregnant wife.

These early encounters between the two brothers -- one knowing the truth of their blood connection, the other still in the dark -- provide some of the freshest and most powerful scenes in the novel. When the brothers meet for the first time, the warmth of the other man's greeting leaves Troy bemused: "'I'm really pleased to meet you,' Jonah said, with a nervous, earnest enthusiasm, as if Troy were someone he had heard of, someone famous." As the two men work together in the downscale tavern known as the Stumble Inn, Troy grows increasingly irritated by Jonah's furtive scrutiny and puzzled by the strange undercurrent passing between them: "He was aware of Jonah, too. Jonah's eyes on him. He'd turn to look over his shoulder and the prickly feeing on the back of his neck would intensify for a moment. . . . Something was wrong with the kid, something beyond the scars, but he wasn't sure how to pinpoint it. . . . Troy had the paranoid idea that maybe Jonah was an undercover agent for the DEA or something, planted here to spy on him."

The slow, painful revelation of the bond between Jonah and Troy forms the heart of You Remind Me of Me, and it is a tribute to Chaon's considerable gifts that the truth, when it comes, deepens as many mysteries within the novel as it solves.

Chaon is an accomplished writer of short stories -- his second collection, Among the Missing, was a finalist for the National Book Award -- and You Remind Me of Me is, in some ways, a story writer's novel. Despite its fragmented, jumpy structure, the book has an unnerving tightness of focus, rarely digressing from its central themes or shifting its gaze from the four central characters -- Jonah, Troy, Nora and Loomis -- all of whom seem like variations on a single melancholy personality. This is deliberate, of course -- the entire book can be seen as an extended meditation on family resemblances -- but it sometimes feels as if Chaon has attempted to transfer Poe's classic doctrine of the "Single Effect" from the narrow confines of the short story to the larger field of the novel. In doing so, he takes a considerable risk of producing a grim and airless narrative, devoid of subplot, comic relief or social commentary.

Yet Chaon has written an apparently claustrophobic novel that feels paradoxically large, generous and, ultimately, quite moving. This is thanks in no small part to his vivid, unadorned prose, which manages at once to be precise and dreamlike, as in this description of Troy's ex-wife: "Carla liked to sprawl. Her sleeping pose was like a cheerleader, frozen in mid-leap, like someone falling backward into water." Mainly, though, the book succeeds because it makes us feel its characters' pain and inhabit a world in which desperate measures often seem like the only ones available.

Reviewed by Tom Perrotta

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Three lives viewed through a kaleidoscope of memories and secret pain assume a kind of mythical dimension in Chaon's piercingly poignant tale of fate, chance and search for redemption. As he demonstrated in his short story collection Among the Missing, Chaon has a sensitive radar for the daily routines of people striving to escape the margins of poverty and establish meaningful lives. Here, a woman's unsuccessful effort to rise above the pain of giving away an illegitimate baby, and to fight against mental illness and offer love to a second child, blights all their lives. Living with his harsh and bitter mother, Norma, and his kindly grandfather in Little Bow, S.Dak., young Jonah Doyle is permanently scarred after the family's Doberman attacks and maims him. The resulting livid ridges on his face are the outward manifestations of a deeper wound that will always haunt him. After his mother's suicide, Jonah sets out to find the older brother he has never met, and in the process, brings them both to the verge of tragedy. Jonah's older sibling is Troy Timmens, a well-meaning bartender and sometime drug dealer in St. Bonaventure, Nebr., who is devoted to his six-year-old son, Loomis. The boy will play a pivotal part in Jonah's quixotic attempts to win Troy's love. Chaon structures his plot in alternating flashbacks, and the fragmentary time structure forces the reader to puzzle out the relationships and contributes to rising dramatic tension. Chaon's clarity of observation, expressed in restrained, nuanced prose, coupled with his compassion for his flawed characters, creates a heart-wrenching story of people searching for connection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Chaon follows a ravishing short story collection, Among the Missing (2001), with a grimly compelling first novel about a fragmented family contending with poverty, tragic legacies, and severe depression. It begins with a self-possessed little boy named Jonah, who lives in Little Bow, South Dakota. His mother, who was forced, as an unwed teen, to give away her firstborn, is cruel, and her Doberman pinscher is vicious, eventually attacking Jonah and leaving him scarred for life both physically and psychologically. Now in his twenties, he's obsessed with finding his unknown half-brother. Meanwhile, Troy, a bartender in a small Nebraska town, is in crisis. Adopted as an infant by parents who soon divorce, he falls in with the town's druggies and marries one. She has disappeared, he has been arrested, and he is terrified that he'll lose custody of his son, the strangely watchful and solitary Loomis. Chaon's finely crafted novel is cogent and suspenseful, but it remains mired in its magnetic, unrelentingly troubled characters, rarely offering anything that transcends its meticulously realistic portrayal of battered lives. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

March 24, 1977

Jonah was dead for a brief time before the paramedics brought him back to life. He never talks about it, but it’s on his mind sometimes, and he finds himself thinking that maybe it’s the central fact of the rest of his life, maybe it’s what set his future into motion. He thinks of the fat cuckoo clock in his grandfather’s living room, the hollow thump of weights and the dissonant guitar thrum of springs as the little door opened and the bird popped out; he thinks of his own heart, which was stopped when they got to him and then suddenly lurched forward, no one knew why, it just started again right around the time they were preparing to pronounce him deceased.


This was in late March 1977, in South Dakota, a few days after his sixth birthday.


If his memory were a movie, the camera would begin high in the air. In a movie, he thinks, you would see his grandfather’s little house from above, you would see the yellow school bus coming to a stop at the edge of the long gravel road. Jonah had been to school that day. He had learned something, perhaps several things, and he rode home in a school bus. There were papers in his canvas knapsack, handwriting and addition and subtraction tables that the teacher had graded neatly with red ink, and a picture of an Easter egg that he’d colored for his mother. He sat on a green vinyl seat near the front of the bus and didn’t even notice that the bus had stopped because he was deeply interested in a hole that someone had cut in the seat with a pocketknife; he was peering into it, into the guts of the seat, which were made of metal springs and stiff white hay.

Outside it was fairly sunny, and the snow had mostly melted. The exhaust from the bus’s muffler drifted through the flashing warning lights, and the silent bus driver lady caused the doors to fold open for him. He didn’t like the other children on the bus, and he felt that they didn’t like him either. He could sense their faces, staring, as he went down the bus steps and stood on the soft, muddy berm.

But in the movie you wouldn’t see that. In the movie you would only see him emerging from the bus, a boy running with his backpack dragging through the wet gravel, a red stocking cap, a worn blue ski jacket, stones grinding together beneath his boots, a pleasantly rhythmic noise he was making. And you would be up above everything like a bird, the long gravel road that led from the mailbox to the house, the weeds along the ditches, the telephone poles, barbed-wire fences, railroad tracks. The horizon, the wide plain of dust and wind.





Jonah’s grandfather’s house was a few miles outside of the small town of Little Bow, where Jonah went to school. It was a narrow, mustard-colored farmhouse with a cottonwood beside it and a spindly chokecherry bush in front. These were the only trees in view, and his grandfather’s place was the only house. From time to time a train would pass by on the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the house. Then the windows would hum like the tuning fork their teacher had shown them in school. This is how sound feels, their teacher said, and let them hold their fingers near the vibrating tines.

Sometimes it seemed to Jonah that everything was very small. In the center of his grandfather’s bare backyard, an empty pint of cream would be the house and a line of matchbook cars, Scotch-taped end to end, would be the train. He didn’t know why he liked the game so much, but he remembered playing it over and over, imagining himself and his mother and his grandfather and his grandfather’s dog, Elizabeth, all of them inside the little pint container, and himself (another part of himself) leaning over them like a giant or a thundercloud, pushing his makeshift train slowly past.





He didn’t call to his grandfather when he came into the house that day. The door banged shut, the furniture sat silently. He could hear the television talking in his grandfather’s room, so he knew his grandfather was there, dozing in the little windowless room, an addition to the house, just space enough for his grandfather’s bed and a dresser, a small TV and a lamp with curlicues of cigarette smoke around them. His grandfather was propped up against some pillows, drinking beer; an old blanket, pilled cotton, silk edges unraveling, was thrown across his grandfather’s middle, an ashtray balanced on it. Tired. His grandfather worked as a janitor, he went to work early in the morning, while it was still dark. Sometimes when Jonah came home from school, his grandfather would come out of his room and tell Jonah stories or jokes, or he would complain about things, about being tired, about Jonah’s mother—What’s the problem with her now? Did you do something to get her mad? I didn’t do anything to her!—and he would swear about people that he didn’t like, people who had cheated him, or maybe he would smile and call Elizabeth to him, Babygirl, babygirl, what are you doing there, does a babygirl want a piece of lunch meat does she? and Elizabeth would come clicking her nails across the floor, her bobbed tail almost vibrating as she wagged it, her eyes full of love as Jonah’s grandfather crooned to her.

But Jonah’s grandfather didn’t come out of his room that day, and Jonah dropped his bookbag to the floor of the kitchen. There was the smell of smoke, and fried eggs, and the old food in the refrigerator. Unwashed dishes in the sink. His grandfather’s door was half-closed, and Jonah sat at the kitchen table for a time, eating cereal.





His mother was at work. He didn’t know whether he missed her or not, but he thought of her as he sat there in the still kitchen. She worked at a place called Harmony Farm, packing eggs, she said, and the tone of her voice made him imagine dark labyrinths with rows of nests, a promenade of sad, dirty workers moving slowly through the passageways.

She wouldn’t talk about it when she got home. Often, she wouldn’t want to talk at all, wouldn’t want to be touched, would make their supper, which she herself wouldn’t eat. She would go to her room and listen to old records she’d had since she was in junior high, her eyes open and her hands in a praying shape beneath her cheek, her long hair spread out behind her on the pillow.





He could stand there for a very long time, watching her from the edge of the doorway and she wouldn’t move. The needle of the phonograph pulsed like a smooth car along the spiraling track of a record album and her eyes seemed to register the music more than anything else, her blinking coinciding with a pause or a beat.

But he knew that she could see him standing there. They were looking at each other, and it was a sort of game—to try to blink when she blinked, to set his mouth in the same shape as her mouth, to hear what she was hearing. It was a sort of game to see how far he could inch into the room, sliding his feet the way a leaf opens, and sometimes he was almost to the center of the room before she finally spoke.

Get out, she would say, almost dreamily.

And then she would turn her face away from him, toward the wall.





He thought of her as his spoon hovered over his cereal. One day, he thought, she wouldn’t come home from work. Or she might disappear in the night. He had awakened a few times: footsteps on the stairs, in the kitchen, the back door opening. From the upstairs window he saw her forcing her arm into the sleeve of her coat as she walked down the driveway. Her face was strange in the pale brightness cast by the floodlights that his grandfather had installed outside the house. Her breath lifted up out of her in the cold and drifted like mist, trailing behind her as she moved into the darkness beyond the circle of porch light.

We won’t be staying long, she would tell Jonah sometimes. She would talk about the places where they used to live as if they’d just come to Jonah’s grandfather’s house for a visit, even though they’d been living there for as long as he could remember—almost three years. He didn’t remember much about the other places she talked about. Chicago. Denver. Fresno. Had he been to these cities? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes things came in flashes and images, not really memories at all—a staircase leading down, with muddy boots outside of it; a man with a fringed jacket like Davy Crockett, asleep on a couch while Jonah looked inside his open mouth; a lamp with autumn leaves patterned on it; a cement shower stall where he and his mother had washed together. Sometimes he thought he remembered the other baby, the one that had been born before him. I was very young, she told him. That was all she would tell. I was very young. I had to give it away.

I remember the baby, he said once, when they were sitting together talking, when she was feeling friendly, holding him in her arms, running her fingernails lightly back and forth across his cheek. I remember the baby, he said, and her face grew stiff. She took her hand away.

No, you don’t, she said. Don’t be stupid. You weren’t even born yet. She sat there for a moment, regarding him, and then she shut her eyes, her teeth tightening against one another as if the sight of him hurt her. Jesus Christ, she said. Why don’t you just forget I ever told you anything. I mean, I confide in you with something that’s very private, and very important, and you want to play little pretend games? Are you a baby?

She sat there coldly, frowning, and began to gather and arrange her hair, ignoring him. She had long hair that reached almost to the belt-loops of her jeans. His grandfather said she looked like the country singer Crystal Gayle. Don’t you think she looks pretty, Jonah? his grandfather would say when he was trying to chee...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345441419
• ISBN 13: 9780345441416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356