Who are you really? Is your identity static or can you slide in and out different personas like a snake shedding skin? If you can, do you lose any sense of who you really are? And ultimately, what are the consequences of all this reinventing of identity?
In age where our personas, who we project ourselves to be on social networks and blogs, don’t always match the truth, Await Your Reply cuts straight to the bone (as you’ll see by the opening chapter), getting underneath our collective skins. Like a puzzle box that you slowly unravel, the novel digs deep into those questions. I don’t loosely throw out the term ‘Hitchcockian’ as it carries great expectations, but the book is just that. As I read Dan Chaon’s novel, I kept thinking to myself, “This is Vertigo.” Imagine Hitchcock’s Vertigo expanded out to include three lost souls all wrapped up in separate intrigues that ultimately involve shedding their personas. That’s not to say that Chaon is ripping off Alfred, he’s just taking a cue from the master and crafting his own wonderful web of lies, deceit, trickery, violence, and murder. From the first chapter you’re hooked and can’t wait to dig deeper.
The novel centers around three separate storylines and duos. Ryan, a Northwestern college student who fakes his own death and walks away from his friends and family, spends his days becoming other people. He travels from town to city, creating identities from scratch in a shady business he learned directly from the man who claims to be his biological father. Lucy, a restless orphan, decides to run off with her high school history teacher to a deserted hotel in Nebraska. Their plan is to shed their identities and flee to a new life somewhere else in the world. And then there’s Miles, whose possibly schizophrenic, yet very intelligent twin brother Hayden constantly haunts him with cryptic phone calls and letters. Hayden disappeared ten years ago and Miles can’t give up the search, always three steps behind the smarter twin.
As expected, nothing goes as planned. Ryan and his father’s schemes start to fall apart when some equally mysterious heavies get on their tails. Lucy begins to get restless, trapped in Nebraska, as her teacher/lover disappears for hours into his locked study working on their schemes, saying nothing about their next move. And Miles, even though he knows better, and should call it a day, still thinks, perhaps this one time, he’ll finally catch Miles, even if it means traveling to the artic north of Canada where he meets who woman who is just as desperate to find the twin brother.
With taut prose, Chaon does a superb job of weaving these storylines together. At first, Ryan, Lucy, and Miles’ experiences seem to be disconnected, but Chaon subtly reveals small clues that click in the back of the reader’s brain, allowing them to begin peeling back the layers of the story. At the same time, Chaon shows the confidence of a skilled writer by knowing how much information the reader needs, never over-explaining or being heavy handed with the intrigue. Once again taking a cue from Hitchcock, he makes superb use of the concept of a MacGuffin. How the identity-shedding schemes actually work is never fully explained, nor the purpose of the mysterious pursuers who show up three-quarters of the way through the novel. Chaon knows these tropes of suspense writing are not as important to the center of the story, which ultimately asks what happens to us when we’re so desperate to shed our identities and become someone else.
The best testament one can give to the novel is that even when you think you have it figured out, you don’t. And the ending, which doesn’t attempt to wrap up loose ends, shows you the parts of the tapestry that you missed. At that point, you want to flip back to page one and re-read the entire book in order to spot everything you missed. That’s the mark of an expertly told story.