There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. Union Atlantic was a more overtly topical story set in the corrupt banking and military world of the US after 9/11, told in rougher prose. This is the second novel by the prizewinning American writer Adam Haslett. Life illuminated in this way becomes so intense that a man about to kill himself can rejoice in the precariousness of existence: “How narrowly we all avoid having never been.” All the characters are wordsmiths, who enjoy the sentences they create and have some belief that to find the right words to describe pain is to make it more bearable. The beauty is the magnificence of nature, love and perhaps most of all art: music, with its power to still unhappiness by reaching “the note that the heart pines for”, and language. The pain is the grief of loss, past and future, and the ordeal of daily life for those unable to imbue it with meaning. The story he spins here is so richly wrinkled that readers may find themselves engaged to a point of near-anger, hopelessly wishing for a different ending even though the ending has been clear from page one.R epeatedly in Imagine Me Gone, troubled characters ask themselves how life can be at once so beautiful and so painful. Haslett loves these characters: every sentence shows it. Michael’s witty, wry observations underscore the often absurd attempts of the family to come together and heal.
When Michael’s over-medicated lifestyle becomes unsustainable, the family conspires to help him start anew–while on some level understanding all along that his fate may already be sealed.Įach family member in Imagine Me Gone is flawed and fumbling each is relentlessly searching even when the objective is unclear. To everyone’s frustration and horror, eldest sibling Michael seems to be following in John’s footsteps. Those who survive him–his children, Michael, Alec, and Celia and his wife, Margaret–spend the rest of their lives with this loss as the centerpiece of their interactions and ambitions. At the heart of the family in this wrenching novel is a tragedy: the patriarch, John, suffering from severe depression, kills himself when his three children are young.
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