Dad said, Imagine me gone, imagine it’s just the two of you. What do you do? There weren’t any boats around or much wind but the water made its own noise and the house was too far away for anyone to hear us if I yelled. I asked him if this was some kind of test. But the way he plays games is to be really serious about it, like it isn’t a game, which makes the games he plays with us more exciting than anything else because everything matters the whole way through and you never know what’s going to happen.Imagine Me Gone is such a perfect family drama – with multi-generational mental illness and shifting POV perspectives on how those who suffer from it become the nucleus around which an entire family orbits – and nothing felt gratuitous or manipulative about this treatment; I believed every word and found myself being tugged into that orbit of concern as well. There are fascinating bits, funny bits, and I ended in tears; I can't ask for more from fiction.
My intention is to avoid spoilers, but I do want to preserve the gist of the story here for myself. The book opens upon a scene of ambiguous crisis: something has happened at a cabin on the Maine coast during the winter off-season, and someone goes looking for help. The book then rewinds to the same stretch of coast in a summer decades past, as a young family prepares for their annual vacation at the private island belonging to the father's friend. POV switches between each of the family members – the parents John and Margaret, the children Michael, Celia, and Alec – and each are given a unique and believable voice. As the history of this family is slowly revealed, we learn that John was hospitalised for a kind of “mental hibernation” soon after he and Margaret were engaged, and although that had been a shock to the young woman, she married him anyway, come what may. The reader can see that there's something not quite right about John as he tries to hold everything together for his family, and in these early sections, we see that Margaret is worried that their eldest, Michael, isn't quite right either. We don't really know the extent of John's pain, however, until our first glimpse inside his mind:
Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won’t do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.As Michael ages he is diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and while at first medication helps him (he felt “lifted down off a hook in the back of my skull that I hadn't even known I'd been hanging from”), escalating symptoms met with new pills and increasing dosages gives him little relief; despite a curious brain, a yearning for love, and a supportive family, it's unclear if Michael will ever be able to live an independent life. From inside his mind:
What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but it's instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.John avoids his son (not wanting to confront what he recognises of himself in his son's terrors), Margaret coddles Michael even into adulthood, and Celia and Alec believe that they are both permanently and solely responsible for their older brother – sighing over every cheery statement their mother makes, ignoring their own partners' pleas for attention, always taking the midnight calls. The development of the family responses over the years was so well done (I particularly ached for Margaret and the way her adult children sideline her contributions) and I was moved by Alec's late epiphany, “For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.” There was a subtle genius to this realisation and there are further scenes of people recognising the truth of each other, outside family roles, that I found incredibly touching.
It often seems that the literary fiction I enjoy the most has some arcane thread running through it that reveals an author's obsessions or, at least, obvious displays of extensive research. In this case, Michael connects with Black music – shown in an early scene listening to disco as though trying to work out an equation – and whether it's meant to reveal his obsessive thought patterns or be an unironic belief system belonging to the author, much is made of music styles that mean little to me, but which Michael uses to back up his political beliefs about slavery, privilege, and the need for reparations to the African-American community:
White-rock homophobia might have killed disco on American radio play but the arc of history bends towards justice. They could burn Diana Ross records at a White Sox game, but on the south side of Chicago four-to-the-floor beats rose from the ashes and got stretched onto ten-minute loops by DJs sampling the heaven out of classic disco. The ubiquity of its traces may render it invisible today, but early house had all the power of all original art, to reveal the structure of the present: the body on the rack of the electronic, the mind on the rack of the virtual. And it didn't just lay the structure bare, it gave the body a means to metabolize it, making the new relentlessness as human as dance.So many hip-hop/house/techno/whatever artists are name-dropped that I've never heard of, used to demonstrate some musical point that Michael is making (but which I didn't really understand), but my lack of total comprehension didn't equate to a lack of appreciation; it all worked for me. Touching and interesting and revelatory of the human experience: this is everything. (And I want to add here, if not on Goodreads itself, that this book is everything that A Little Life tried, and spectacularly failed, to be.)
