by Dan Chaon
2009, Ballantine Books
Last year I read a short story by Dan Chaon called "The Bees" in a collection published by McSweeney's called Thrilling Tales which was edited by Michael Chabon featuring genre exercises. Later I discovered "The Bees" in an edition of the Best American Short Story series (2003, maybe?) and was equally impressed by it.
A couple of weeks ago Chaon's new book was reviewed in the New York Times Sunday book review and I remembered liking "The Bees" enough that I requested it from the library.
Await Your Reply begins aptly enough with an excerpt from Anna Ahkmatova that reads, "I myself, from the very beginning,/Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium/Or a reflection in someone else's mirror." Appropriately enough, the novel's plot is concerned directly with the idea of identity theft.
The novel alternates chapters between three characters: a twin searching for his schizophrenic brother who has been involved in hacking and theft; an orphaned high school senior who leaves home with her high school history teacher; and a college boy who discovers his real biological dad is his stoner uncle.
The story opens with the college-age kid having his hand cut off at the wrist and then flashes back in time, slowly ratcheting up the suspense. The college kid, Jay, lives in a cabin in the woods with his uncle. The uncle involves his son in an identity theft scheme where Jay travels around moving money from one account to another in cities like Vegas. Jay's non-biological parents eventually give up searching for him and he is declared dead, leaving Jay with a stack of passports and credit cards that add up to a more substantial identity than the one he left behind.
This line between one's "actual" identity and the various assumed identities filched throughout the narrative is the main thematic concern of the book. Chaon's characters are ill-at-ease with their identities.
Both of the kids in the book, Jay and Lucy (who ran away with her teacher), face crises of identity revolving around parental abandonment issues. Lucy's parents died in an accident and she is left to come-of-age with no one to help her navigate the path of self-discovery. Jay, as mentioned previously, that his parents are not his parents.
Jay uses his new identities as an easy comfort in the face of his own ontological uncertainty, slipping into various disguises knowing that the pressures of being are lighter when he can focus on superficial (and unnecessary) details like mustaches and wardrobe. Lucy, on the other hand, chafes at the thought of abandoning her as yet unformed identity in favor of an assumed one. Lucy bucks at the seeming burial of her past and is alarmed to discover that without the birth certificate and social security card she left behind her, she too finds the assumed identities a greater proof of existence than her own.
Miles, the twin who is not schizophrenic, has his own issues of identity. His life is lived in a limbo that lends itself to being shaken off at a moment's notice to follow his brother's cryptic clues throughout the country. Miles's sense of self is defined by his connection to his brother and his brother's concerted attempts to elicit his brother's pursuit and then to cruelly evade him. Miles feels no sense of purpose in his life beyond what his brother's cat-and-mouse games which seem designed in their taunting superiority to emphasize the lack of definition in Miles's life.
It is obvious from fairly early on in the book that one of the middle-aged adult characters is Miles's brother under a stolen identity, and there are clues strewn about those two other narratives as Miles conducts his search. Whether Mr. Chaon intended this transparency or not, the narrative is no worse for this predictability. The book's engine is this terrifying sense of inevitability and ruin. As the plot untwists itself and reveals its secrets, the effect is more of a sickening realization ("Oh, yes, of course!") than it is self-satisfied superiority ("I saw that coming!").
The novel's plot is exceedingly clever in that its secrets are in plain sight, just carefully obscured by the presence of the three narratives. But moreover, the plot carefully and precisely elicits some of the modern terror we feel about our identity in a global society. We do not feel the papers that prove our existence to our governments necessarily define us. And yet we are terrified of the theft of these documents, which of course mean only what we agree upon as a society that they mean. To live without a birth certificate is deny yourself the ability to be freely mobile - to possess a driver's license for example, or to obtain a passport for international mobility. Yet it is foolish to think these pieces of paper are secure or to rely on them to provide a sense of self.
Mr. Chaon's novel is, in a sense, about characters who live on the outskirts of these agreed-upon standards of living. These characters essentially live without the foolishness of equating these societal conventions with self-knowledge. They do, however, utilize the system to their advantage, using these conventions to obtain wealth if never security.
Mr. Chaon's characters are self-inventors. They disavow (or are forced to disavow) a sense of allegiance to something so false as a birth certificate. Our parents give us our names and because of this fact we associate a great deal of our self-knowledge in these names, in tying these names to a sense of personal history that lends some rhyme or reason to our existence.
Why this name? What does that tell me about that events that lead to my birth? What might this name infer about the expectations of me in this life? We then define ourselves by the extent of our willingness to realize these expectations and hopes, our willingness to carry along the line of history that brought about our lives.
Mr. Chaon's characters are freed for various reasons from this line of history, connections to parents are severed and these identities are left undefined, floundering, until some the occasion of self-invention and the luxury (and danger) of reinvention, and of the ultimate futility of evading the larger questions of self-knowledge.
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