You Remind Me of Me (review)

Dan Chaon makes a successful transition from short story to the novel with his captivating You Remind Me of Me. Author of the collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing (a National Book Award finalist), Chaon displays in his new book a masterful sense of plotting and pacing, together with his already established ability to sketch sympathetic portrayals of characters we might ordinarily dismiss.

As with Chaon's short fiction, the novel's protagonists hail from Nebraska and South Dakota. In his "Red State" Midwest, not a word is said about God or religion, and small-town life features drug addiction, indifferent mothers, infidelity, a dog attack, dead-end jobs, an abduction, plenty of depression and, of course, death.

Figure 1.

You Remind Me of Me.

This unremittingly bleak and sad novel follows the lives of two half-brothers, Troy and Jonah, as well as that of their tragic mother, Nora. At sixteen, living alone with her father in a shack outside Little Bow, South Dakota, after the mysterious death of her mother, Nora, a solid student, becomes pregnant, and over her father's protests she refuses to identify the father (a high school classmate). Instead she drops out of school. Though she attempts to induce an abortion—she tastes bleach and uses a knitting needle on herself—she finally elects to put the child up for adoption. It's 1966, and she's sent to the Mrs. Glass Home for unwed mothers-to-be, where the stern director forbids girls to hold private conversations or discuss the fathers of their children. During rare trips into town for a movie or ice-cream cone, each girl is given a gold-painted strip of tin to wear as a wedding ring.

Troy, her son, is moved to St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, but soon his adoptive family dissolves in divorce. At a young age, he's drawn to his older cousins, who let him watch their young son while they deal drugs and party with friends. Troy grows up to become a drug dealer himself and marries a drug addict, who ditches him soon after giving birth to their son, Loomis, perhaps the most mature character in the novel. Loomis is the type of boy who at age six asks adults, "May I use the restroom?" and constantly checks his watch "because he likes to be in bed at exactly eight-thirty."

For his first thirty years, Troy is unaware of Jonah, who was born in 1971, his father unknown. An innocent, Jonah endures a savage attack by his grandfather's Doberman pinscher that leaves him with serious physical scars and even deeper emotional scars. Chaon's portrayal of Jonah is one of the most poignant aspects of the book. After his mother's sudden death, Jonah moves to Chicago, where he tries to forget the past and set out on a new life, equipped with Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Life, which he's removed from the Little Bow library. He takes college classes, works at a restaurant and tries hard to make friends. Time and again Jonah fails to connect; he's shy and awkward, used to spending nights alone in his tiny apartment and at corner bars, always unnerving with his livid facial scars. Particularly moving is a chapter in which Jonah befriends a family he meets through work. Not even the excessively upbeat couple can withstand the "smothering" that he mistakes for establishing a friendship: one week Jonah leaves them fifteen phone messages, all of which go unanswered. As one character observes, Jonah reminds him of "the abused kids he'd known in grade school—that expression they'd get if you'd pay attention to them, a bleak hopefulness opening briefly and then shutting."

It's an encounter on the Chicago El with a familiar-looking man (a stranger, it turns out) that impels Jonah to think of his half-brother, often mentioned ruefully by his mother. The plot intensifies...