Await your Reply: A review

I like this interview with novelist Dan Chaon, found on The Believer. I like the part where he talks about his tiny little grotto in the attic where he writes, the "filthy hermit's apartment stuffed with stacks of newspapers and petrified sandwiches." I also like the part where he equates the writer's life with that of a drunk, where you "go on an all-night bender and then waking up and thinking, "You know, I think I'll do that again.""

I got to that interview because I recently read Chaon (pronouncing like Shawn)'s latest novel, "Await your Reply," last week. It's a suspense novel told in three braided parts by three young adults held in the thrall of shadowy mentors. There are allusions to Frankenstein, to Hitchcock, to Stephen King. The main plot is driven by identity theft and internet scams, and the question of how these people are connected. After a slow start, it picks up steam and becomes an enthralling, haunting page turner.

It's spooky as hell, really, even if not everything works right. I had a hard time believing Lucy, a recent high school graduate who has run off with her history teacher, was really in love. It wasn't just the lack of any sexual energy between the two characters, but her overall passivity that turned me off. Likewise, Miles, whose twin brother descended into the depths of schizophrenia, was equally passive, and though intensely obsessed with finding his twin Hayden, was clumsy and incompetent as an investigator. Ryan, the third central character, goes to Las Vegas to execute a con that nets him thousands of dollars, and spends the night in his hotel room, too spooked to order up a forty dollar hooker. Something about that just seemed wrong to me, but maybe that says more about me and my dirty mind than it does about Chaon's skills as a novelist.

Also, the details of the identity scams that backbone the master plots were laughably sketchy. The central scam itself that gives the novel its title is based on a variant of the Nigerian scam that any fifth grader can see through, which seriously undermines what little reality underlies the plot. Chaon freely admits he didn't to a lot of research on the authenticity of internet scams, preferring to concentrate on the psychology of theft, so I'll cut him some slack for that, because as I said earlier, it's a pretty good page turner.

There are also some beautiful scenes in this novel: one fantastic set piece takes two characters to the bottom of an evaporated lake bed in Nebraska, where a once drowned village has been returned to the air in a state of phantasmagoric transformation. Miles's journey to a remote island in the Canadian arctic is equally harrowing. And the conception of individuals as real-life representations of on-line personas whose real life is in the Internet, is a disturbing allegory of modern isolationism, and I awoke one night from disturbing dreams whose seeds, I'm sure, were planted in this novel. Chaon himself, tucked away in his writer's attic, clicking his way around the internet while researching this book, probably got a little spooked during the course of his writing, and who could blame him?

Lots of people called this their favorite book of 2009, including Michael Schaub of Bookslut. It was also a finalist for the National Book Awards of that year. While Schaub may have been a bit overexuberant, it's easy to see his point. Who are we, and what is a person? Chaon asks these sorts of questions all the time. True, it's kind of a naive question, really, when you think about it. But in the age of the Internet, when we as persons are defined more as agents in a transactional monetary system, rather than as biological beings with connections to other real people, it's one worth asking. "Await your Reply" may or may not work for you, but it's important because it finds answers that are disturbing but true, which is what we should expect of any art.