Imagine Me Gone

One of the finalists for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone is one of those books that proves Tolstoy's line that "all unhappy families are different in their own ways." Of course, the first part of that quote is that "all happy families are alike," but there are no happy families in literature. I doubt there are any in life.

The book covers thirty some years in the lives of a married couple and their three children, using revolving narrators. John, the father, is a distracted Englishman, worrying about his career. His wife Margaret is a long-suffering mother, the kind of domestic goddess that still puts up Christmas stockings even after her kids are completely grown.

The three children are somewhat stock types: the manic depressive, the uptight gay guy, and the exceedingly normal sister. What they all have in common is that their lives are hijacked by the crazy one, Michael, the oldest, who pines over women he can't have and is in and out of hospitals.

This happens early in the book, so it isn't much of a spoiler--the dad kills himself. We don't know how, he just goes into the woods and doesn't come back. He has taken the children back to his native England for a few years, then returns to Massachusetts. I would imagine a suicide of a parent is something that one never gets over, but he isn't mentioned much afterward, as Michael becomes more depressed, taking a smorgasbord of pills.

The book has five narrators, but I kept looking forward to Michael's. Despite his neuroses, he's a hoot. One chapter is hilarious, as he is on a cruise and sends letters to his aunt that turn into a narrative about white slavery. He mentions that his younger brother Alec has gone missing on the boat: "Apparently, he’d been abducted by a child-prostitution ring down on deck 3. English, Russians, and he thought maybe Dutch. He was about to be sealed in a crate and smuggled to a Soviet resort on the Black Sea when he managed to secrete himself on the bottom of a curtained tea trolley that rolled him into the kitchens."

Michael also loves music--his only regular income is writing record reviews--and he meets the girl who will send him over the edge in a record shop: "I toured the remaining indie record shops on Saturday mornings when the new shipments arrived. It was on one such outing, after many dateless years, that I encountered Bethany. She had a tiny glistening nose stud, and a nearly shaved head, and was flipping through a bin of Aphex Twin. Need I say more?" Michael is attracted to black women, and attempts to enter a graduate program in African-American Studies. He admits, "romantically, I would have been a lot better off as a lesbian of color, that’s for sure."

Michael is so interesting that this makes the rest of the family a little dull. Alec is a writer for a political news outfit, and maneuvers his way through his first serious relationship (he also picks up a man on a train and gets a blowjob in the parking lot). Celia, the middle sister, has the least interesting life, even though she counsels troubled people. She has a boyfriend she's not sure about, gets pregnant, has an abortion, and fields Michael's frantic calls.

But I liked this family, and I felt for them. I'm about two clicks away from ending up like Michael, and the strain of a family member with mental illness is shown here in a clear light. The ending, which didn't pack as much of a wallop as it should have, indicates that a sibling with Michael's kind of condition sucks the vitality out of all other family members. But what is a person to do?

I appreciated the humor of the book more than I did the sorrow, and for that reason alone I recommend it. If you have a loved one who committed suicide or has a mental illness, it may be tough. Nobody's committed suicide in my family, and are mental illnesses are the kind that are high-functioning.