In Imagine Me Gone, Haslett focuses tightly on a family tormented by father-and-son battles with chronic depression and anxiety and their attempt, through it all, to answer the question of what constitutes a good, meaningful life. Although by no means a light or easy read, Haslett's new novel forcefully demonstrates that he is unrivaled at capturing the lasting reverberations of suicide and the draining tedium and despair — along with the occasionally fabulous flights of fancy — that accompany intransigent mental illness. And he achieves this with an extraordinary blend of precision, beauty, and tenderness.
By putting the readers in the same position as Michael’s family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel — the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation...But make no mistake, the novel’s most rewarding surprise is its heart. Again and again, the characters subtly assert that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted. Whether it’s a choice or a learned behavior or a genetic imperative of the species, our constant slouching toward compassion is a lucky obligation. Even when confusing or crazy-making, it’s the higher calling of our blood. It’s a responsibility, a relief.
Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. 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. But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur ... Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs ... my two days of reading the book felt less like a reading experience than a life experience: two days of terror and loss ... There is a lot about honour and care here: about what it means to honour and care for both ourselves and those we love. Haslett’s prose, so finely adapted for each of the characters, seems to do just this, honouring the living and the dead and rendering life precious.
For what it’s worth, Imagine Me Gone is indeed a huge downer...But to harp on its depressive qualities is missing the true beauty of the work. By signing on with Haslett and his characters we are given the chance to look beyond our minutiae and daily distractions in order to notice the passage of time as experienced by others. We are reminded of what it is like to be truly, if fleetingly, alive.
With its fugue of voices, each contributing a vital slant to the action, Imagine Me Gone offers rigorous formal pleasures. Yet while flirting with narrative artifice, Haslett stays keenly aware that in this family there is no explanation 'sufficient to account for the events . . . [L]ives weren’t works of art.' In acknowledging that, Imagine Me Gone respects the mystery of how things happen the way they happen, while brilliantly conjuring the tide-like pull with which dreaded possibilities become harsh inevitability.
Adam Haslett’s second novel has a traditional structure that we’ve seen before: a mother and father and their three children navigate a series of domestic crises, from job losses and abortions to mental illness. But Haslett’s considerable skills as a writer turn domestic conflicts into something more profound...Imagine Me Gone is a handsome work, but handsome doesn’t mean flawless. The book would have been stronger if Michael’s slide had been more gradual. But there are many gorgeous touches here, as when Margaret says that, of her three babies, Michael was the only one who wouldn’t stop crying when she picked him up.
...Michael is one of five narrators in Gone and by far the book’s most vivid. If other characters recede in his wake, it also feels true to the impact of mental illness, and Haslett’s writing is at its best when he illuminates not just madness but what it means to witness it, too.
Imagine Me Gone fulfills its considerable ambitions. It touches greatness, and its seamless interleaving of the deeply personal with the widely collective is one reason...Haslett’s peculiar talent is to fuse the high to the low, the sardonic to the profound, cultural critique to human feeling, to achieve a seamless, polished whole. Imagine Me Gone accomplishes a complex feat, bringing close that most distant personality, the socially detached depressive, while giving the specificity of his guilt tangible weight.
We never even learn their last name. But we come to know the family at the center of Adam Haslett’s powerful new novel, Imagine Me Gone, as intimately as if they were our own...Imagine Me Gone is slow to get started — we’re dropped into a plot in progress and must pick up the family’s story at a few different moments in its history. Stick with it. Once Haslett has you, you’re along for the ride with Margaret, John, Michael, Celia and Alec: as absorbed by — and powerless over — their fate as they are.
Mr. Haslett is alert to the reality of others, and the insinuating power of this novel comes from its framing of mental illness as a family affair. Michael’s siblings are both wholly convincing characters, shaped by the abiding question of how much, or how little, they are meant to act as their brother’s keepers.
There are some books, and this is one, that grab you in the first paragraphs and don't let go, even when the last page has been read. Haslett is certainly not the first novelist to broach the topic of depression...But he's done so with such a fresh voice and playfulness of form—Michael's sections dance from imagined, parodic notes to his therapist, aunt, and creditors, to claustrophobic catalogs of star-crossed crushes and music history—that the resulting novel begs a reevaluation of how we view and cope with tragedy. It's the epitome of that oft-misappropriated axiom, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
An ambitious book about music, anxiety, and a family determined to stick together after fracturing loss, Imagine Me Gone is proof that realistic stories have immense power.
Haslett's aching, psychologically astute novel rotates among the five voices of its Waspy nuclear family, jumping back and forth in time to suggest how this family's haunted past will creep into its tragic future...Imagine Me Gone confronts the moment when the motion finally stops, when the mind's wheels spin and squeal against the skull until a person breaks apart, his family looking on helplessly, haunting him and haunted by him.
...mental illness in contemporary fiction is often lousy, too. Readers endure either earnest clinical depictions — usually thinly veiled critiques of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex — or out-there prose that's supposed to evoke madness but instead reads like gassy rambling. Adam Haslett's brilliant second novel, Imagine Me Gone, is a remarkable exception, capturing two troubled minds with rare empathy, realism and insight. ... a memorable, funny and ultimately heartbreaking trip.
Haslett is especially adept at depicting the obsessive male psyche in the midst of meltdown, whether over relationships or music or while on drugs ... In contrast, Haslett’s female characters are less vivid than the men, though this may be by design. They alleviate the threat of exhausting the reader as they endure bout after bout of intense male mental drama, grounding the book back in reality — which makes the story of the men all the more wrenching. Imagine Me Gone is not always easy to read. You’ve been warned, male readers: The moments when you are in Michael’s mind might make you fear your own. But as this is also a series of deft vignettes of paternal, maternal and filial love, you too will likely be moved to recall your family with a new fondness and understanding.
It’s in Michael’s storytelling about himself and his family that Haslett has created a distinctive and winning voice and character that transforms what might have otherwise been just-another-accomplished-literary-novel about an American family’s tragicomic goings on into something far more affecting and beguiling...Haslett is at his very best in the sections where he unfolds Michael’s chaotic and exuberant interior life as answers to banal medical form questions. The result is a tour-de-force of manic brilliance, both zealously funny and painfully sad, as when he recounts his life story as anecdotes associated with the various prescription drugs he’s taken over the years (to ever diminishing returns).
Haslett’s short-story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, earned a National Book Award nomination and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this effort did just as well ... You grow attached to each of the characters, and then right when you start loving one the most, you get yanked out of their head and plunked down into a new view of the same world. The underlying emotional engine of the book (besides Haslett’s masterful control of language, allusions, and scene construction) is the eeny-meeny-miny-moe dread of wondering how much destructive depression the father has passed down to his kids ... The quality of Haslett’s character portrayals, his language, and his scene construction in Imagine Me Gone are apparent enough, but the way you know this book is going to stick around for a while is that—with the possible exception of the prologue—not one word is wasted.
