In Laura van den Berg’s gorgeously contemplative debut novel, Find Me, America is in the thick of a near-apocalypse brought about by widespread memory loss and eventual death ... Find Me is a distinctly American book, spotted with pilgrims and protesters dressed in black, concerned with questions of national identity. The plague is confined within the states, and Joy’s journey has glimmers of a cautionary travelogue ... It’s impossible to read this book and not consider other epidemics of forgetting, the kind that happen every day ... Van den Berg’s prose is honest and searching, an inquisitive tonic for a destroyed world. Questions plant themselves between paragraphs, unanswered, and curiosity steams through her book like a freight train of hope ... Her story sticks somewhere inside, impossible to forget.
Find Me is split in two, with the first half chronicling Joy’s experience at the Hospital and recollections of her traumatic past. This section is suspenseful and taut. In the second half, Joy embarks on her quixotic road trip from Kansas to Florida to meet the woman she believes is her mother. These later chapters are more meandering and episodic ... Despite the shortcomings in its latter half, Find Me is impressively original and tricky to categorize. Before dismissing it as yet another dystopian novel, know that the lure of a deadly epidemic proves somewhat misleading. The viral outbreak is relegated to the background, its ominous implications never fully explored ... Nor is Find Me a familiar narrative of a child in search of a long-lost parent. Whether the object of Joy’s fixation is her real mother, a ghost, a dream or just 'an idea of a person' makes no difference in the end.
Despite this post-apocalyptic setup, van den Berg is less focused on the epidemic than she is interested in creating a world in which memory can be mined. As in other dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Joy’s narration is elegiac, acutely aware of her proximity to death, both now and in the past ... Without the structure imposed by the hospital and its daily routine, the narrative wanders, and some of the coincidences that occur are implausible. The novel, however, powerfully conveys the fact that there are some things in life you don’t want to forget.
Find Me is her first foray into novel-length fiction, and while she dazzlingly expands her scope, she mostly skims the surface of her premise ... Joy's episodic journey takes on the air of a typical dystopian road trip: She encounters quirky characters, an eerie breakdown of social order, and new rules by which she must learn to live. But her quest — to find the mother she never knew — never feels particularly urgent, nor does any part of Find Me. Joy is an absorbing, insightful narrator capable of poetic feats of observation, but her numb, deadpan angst is a heel-dragging burden ... Van Den Berg's prose has a chiming clarity that helps anchor the story when Joy's journey flirts with magic realism ... As Find Me drifts, listless and lukewarm, towards its conclusions, the epiphanies fall like soft rain. So do the clichés ... A tepid, noncommittal dabbling in ideas, dreams, and fears that demand a lot more depth.
This dreamlike gap in Joy’s memory from childhood provides a texture to Find Me that permeates the novel ... The second half of Find Me maintains the same dreamlike quality as the first, becoming increasingly surreal as Joy heads toward Florida. A long stay at a backcountry 'Mansion' in Tennessee feels ghostlike and illusory ... Find Me isn’t a commentary on the fluidity or reliability of memory, but is more a rumination on how memories act as anchors to the present ... Laura van den Berg brings a thoughtful and quiet look to an apocalyptic landscape ... Her work marries surreal elements with the real world in a restrained way, producing moments in the novel where the two feel fully joined. Van den Berg’s talents as a writer are observed in her minimal and direct prose, the interiority of her characters, and the limitlessness of her imagination.
Aciman writes beautifully about the fear that the most important person in your life will become no more than a tangent ... Yet Find Me reads more like a pastiche of the earlier novels. It is full of clichéd dinner party exchanges about the importance of literature and art and the courage to love. And it’s hard to detect even a soupçon of irony when Sami, invigorated by his nubile lover, confesses that he’s always wanted to get an earring, an edgy haircut and a tattoo. Steady on, Daddio! But it’s the numerous I-could-be-your-father-type comments that end up killing the passion.
What follows is a cross-country adventure through the wrecked landscape of a wounded country, and van den Berg deftly parallels these tortured wanderings with flashbacks to Joy’s hard upbringing ... Throughout Find Me, we see Joy tossed about like a leaf on the wind, helpless as others exert their power over her and unable to find her own. On the road, the buses she hops seem to move about capriciously, and in her flashbacks, we see her assaulted by her fellow orphans or outright violated by an older foster sibling, a troubled psychologist who subjects her to odd tests that are the product of his own disordered thinking ... In Find Me, van den Berg depicts a life slowly coming into focus — it’s blurry and impressionistic at times, sometimes deliriously scattered. But out of the fog of memory and the haze of drugs emerges a sense of clarity that’s deep and moving and real.
... short, spare ... People in [Aciman's] universe are refreshingly sexually fluid, rejecting arbitrary binaries, finding attraction to the soul, never merely the body ... Aciman compassionately captures the achingly delicate, barely discernible feelings and observations exchanged between people, be it strangers on a train or couples who’ve been together—or apart—for decades. He is a master of approximating the unsaid sentiments, of stating the ineffable sensations in plain language, in terms of universal understanding. The storytelling may be swift and breezy, but the ideas and psychological truthfulness are deep. It is a tender and quiet story. Aciman exercises considerable restraint with his prose and dialogue in this respect ... With descriptive elegance, attention to cultural detail and emphasis on decorum, Aciman’s style and sensibilities invite favorable comparison to Edmund White. Find Me is a story told through conversations. Characters are revealed through unexpected, even awkward confrontations. They are further developed through reflections on those alarmingly open and frank exchanges ... Aciman finds thoughtful parallels and metaphors between aging and antiquity, common ground between missed opportunities and mysterious artifacts under investigation. It is the book’s central theme.
'Who' is often the motivating question in her work and her plots catch characters in the act of reconsidering their identities ... The epidemic sounds an apocalyptic note that rings throughout the novel, but the genre tropes linking Find Me to The Walking Dead, or to recent literary dystopias like Station Eleven, are ultimately subsumed by Joy’s driving need to find a place in the world ... At times, van den Berg slyly employs the genre to comment on our cultural fascination with cataclysm ... The most invigorating aspect of Find Me is the tenacity with which its author pursues her staple obsessions. Rather than retreat into convention to shore up her first foray into the novel form, van den Berg sticks to her guns and lets her idiosyncrasies off the tether ... For better and sometimes worse, abstraction haunts this novel. People live apart from one another; they are often granted one or two distinguishing quirks; they speak in vague, ethereal dialogue ... For the most part, though, Van den Berg’s prose is heartfelt, light of touch and wryly funny.
... the perfect sequel to Call Me by Your Name – lustful, introspective and magical – though it is a work that requires readers to suspend disbelief almost to a fault ... has everything you loved – and everything that made you cringe – about Call Me by Your Name ... One can’t help but cringe when considering this exchange and other moments through a #MeToo-era lens – not to mention that there are no female narrators. This unbalanced power dynamic isn’t fully explored, something Aciman also didn't unpack in the first novel ... Aciman’s languid, rhythmic writing does an excellent job distracting you from what might otherwise give you pause; the Find Me romances are sensual and gripping. He writes like a cross-country runner: He slows and speeds pacing but never loses sight of the finish line. That question, though, of whether the Find Me romances should exist, doesn’t quite go away ... also fails to address the HIV/AIDS crisis in any way. The world Aciman has created seems to exist outside of time. It's not that every novel must reflect the state of the world in which its published. But when a work of art is altogether strong, it's that much more frustrating when individual pieces don't quite shine.
Rarely does a bleak novel achieve the same alluring strength of sadness. Laura van den Berg’s debut novel Find Me is that rare novel. It has the same potency as the most melancholy music ... The first half of the novel shifts between the present and flashbacks, exploring time and memory. There are loose threads, odd remarks and events that are never fully explained or resolved. Characters appear and disappear as they do in life, without handing us their reason for coming or going. But the key mysteries, carefully mapped in the first half, are satisfyingly wrapped up in the end ... It’s the physicality of van den Berg’s prose, the believability of the individual details not quite adding up to our world, that keeps the uncanny, just-off-kilter novel from spilling over, from turning into the kind of magic psychosis that Murakami often delights in ... Find Me has a psychological depth and a desolate, noirish gravity. The whole shimmering novel hangs together and propels the reader forward with its unusual brand of dream logic.
Laura van den Berg is gifted at creating psychologically complex characters; her observations of the world are deeply poetic ... The carefully constructed environment of the hospital created a tension that seemed to be building towards a delicious climax, but outside the novel's dramatic machinery falters ... At times it feels here as though there is too much, and van den Berg struggles to keep a handle on everything. Memory and identity are such rich themes; what I wanted was for van den Berg to extract meaning from these potent ideas she offers us in the first few pages ... In the end, it's as though as readers we are suffering from a mysterious illness ourselves: intoxicated and confused by van den Berg's broken world, but not immune to its beauty.
Find Me is similarly excellent because its narrator, Joy Jones, doesn't so much overshadow the dystopian genre in which she finds herself, as cannibalise it ... It's in the second half of the book, though – where Joy escapes the Hospital and sets out in search of her mother – that its quality becomes apparent ... Every character she meets has their own explanation for the epidemic, which, we realise, isn't intended as a social comment ... Find Me is less a dystopia, than a moving, and frequently funny, exploration of character and of trauma.
This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, 2013, etc.) tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology ... Van den Berg’s writing is curiously beautiful, and her portrayals can also be disarmingly sensitive, as if we might break this girl just by reading about her ... A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world.
The debut novel from van den Berg brings the lightly speculative touch to real-world longing that characterizes her collections...but against an apocalyptic backdrop that, at first, feels all too familiar ... This post-Hospital half of the novel plays to van den Berg’s strengths, with wild excursions into dangerous new environments populated by memorable oddballs, never losing sight of the emotional core of Joy’s quest. The earlier chapters are hampered by future-isms that are cliché and conclusions that feel tedious or foregone—but in Joy, van den Berg has created a voice that never feels false, only lost and dreaming of being found.
