Its title notwithstanding, Adam Haslett's new novel Imagine Me Gone (Little Brown) doesn't do tricks. It's about ordinary people in familiar, present-day situations. Its language is as sharp and bug-free as a surgical tool, and it eschews sensationalism. It has a moral compass, installed so deeply in its works that it never has to announce itself or pause to moralize. In an age that can't get enough of the genealogy of bad morals, the novel is a triumph of anti-pathologizing the likes of which we too rarely encounter.
It's as if its author's sensibility, unmistakably gay, has entered Jonathan Franzen's airspace with some daredevil if psychically grounded skywriting. Something clearly is rotten in Franzenland, Updikeville, the white, middle-class-wannabe American Northeast-based family; there's detectable mental illness in every ring of the family tree. Yet there's not a single cliche to be found in the compost, where, against all odds, living things grow, or move on anyway. The incident that gives the novel its title, recounting which would be a crime, is an utterly chilling evocation of the ordinary horrors of childhood, light-years away from the fashionable abuse-porn of our time.
Even the "sins of the fathers" trope breaks down. Pater familias John, an avatar of British civility unsuccessfully grafted onto American personal powerlessness, is no sinner, but rather a well-meaning depressive. In the one chapter in which we hear his voice directly, he talks about depression in all of its typical manifestations but with a particularity that will startle even the most seasoned sufferer of the disease. "The monster doesn't take words. It may take speech, but not words in the head, which are its minions. The army of the tiny, invisible dead wielding their tiny, spinning scythes, cutting at the flesh of the mind. Unlike ordinary blades, they sharpen with use. There is nothing deep about this. It is merely endless."
His suicide will come as a surprise only to the one child granted a foreboding vision of it, in its exact natural setting, well before it happens. First offspring Michael has so many screws loose that they rattle. He's obsessed by music, primally black fare or blisteringly loud alternative rock at full rant, though he himself has only one instrument to play, language, similarly as shrill as it is brilliant. He's a string stretched so tight that the sympathetic strings of everyone around him are sent thrumming. No one, especially the reader, can resist his keening cry for love.
He's like a self-ventriloquist. In his chapters, he throws his voice in intricate ragas of wild imaginings. His most personal musings masquerade as responses to unlikely vehicles: therapy intake forms, military-style "after-action reports" of family therapy sessions, application letters for creditor forbearance. The first one, the motor for the novel's plot, is a rambling psychiatrist's answering-machine outgoing message that ends: "Finally, if this is about a refill for a medication you require in order to survive, and you have some concern that your request may not reach me in time, and it seems likely that the words you are about to speak into this machine will be your last, then please know that you tried very hard indeed, and that you loved your family as deeply as you could."
Clearly, this novel issues from a sensibility that has done time on the couch. But, critically, Haslett's language has been scoured of argot and treats the platitudes of therapy like death threats. All five family members tell this story, not in turn but compellingly in sequence, in their own words, words so pitch-perfectly their own that they scarcely need physical description to walk right off the page.
No particular pathology clings to third sibling Alec, crybaby child turned bossy-bottom adult, whose gayness per se seems like a problem only for his eventual boyfriend Seth. Their unlikely coupledom supplies some of the novel's most tender passages. The reader, having first met Alec in a precisely rendered episode of anonymous cruising with an older man on a bus (before its consummation, "the anesthesia was almost complete"), cannot help but thaw, albeit cautiously, when Seth arrives.
"A few minutes ago we'd had our dicks in each other's mouths," Alec realizes during the first sleepover at Seth's. "We'd kissed and tongued. But all that had been routine. This was different, and riskier. It hinted at intimacy. He was actually touching me. And I was letting him do it."
Alec's effort to save his older brother by weaning him off the meds that have, others think, clouded his psyche �" though they do not diminish Michael's vocabulary or imagination in his increasingly brilliant exercises in irony-laced dissociation �" ends tragically. But much of Haslett's deep seriousness is wrapped in the language of high comedy, black as it is. His previous, first novel, Union Atlantic of 2009, showed a comparable capacity for ribaldry of Shakespearian dimensions. This book would be unbearable without the comedy, unfailingly of the immensely human variety.
Such as the novel has a motto, it is expressed by middle-child Celia in the plot's denouement, which transpires like the cooling of lava. Grown-up Celia has become a therapist in San Francisco, and, like her creator, over time grows only more suspicious of the questionable theses of self-help.
"An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for moments in [clients'] past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That's what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn't offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on I realized that my clients' lives weren't works of art."
But Haslett's infinitely subtle, insinuating novel is, and no one in it is worse off for it.