You Remind Me of Me [Hardcover]

Dan Chaon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

With his critically acclaimed Among the Missing and Fitting Ends, award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes the Chicago Tribune, who can “convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so.” Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel.

You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Three lives viewed through a kaleidoscope of memories and secret pain assume a kind of mythical dimension in Chaon's piercingly poignant tale of fate, chance and search for redemption. As he demonstrated in his short story collection Among the Missing, Chaon has a sensitive radar for the daily routines of people striving to escape the margins of poverty and establish meaningful lives. Here, a woman's unsuccessful effort to rise above the pain of giving away an illegitimate baby, and to fight against mental illness and offer love to a second child, blights all their lives. Living with his harsh and bitter mother, Norma, and his kindly grandfather in Little Bow, S.Dak., young Jonah Doyle is permanently scarred after the family's Doberman attacks and maims him. The resulting livid ridges on his face are the outward manifestations of a deeper wound that will always haunt him. After his mother's suicide, Jonah sets out to find the older brother he has never met, and in the process, brings them both to the verge of tragedy. Jonah's older sibling is Troy Timmens, a well-meaning bartender and sometime drug dealer in St. Bonaventure, Nebr., who is devoted to his six-year-old son, Loomis. The boy will play a pivotal part in Jonah's quixotic attempts to win Troy's love. Chaon structures his plot in alternating flashbacks, and the fragmentary time structure forces the reader to puzzle out the relationships and contributes to rising dramatic tension. Chaon's clarity of observation, expressed in restrained, nuanced prose, coupled with his compassion for his flawed characters, creates a heart-wrenching story of people searching for connection.
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–This first novel focuses on the disparate lives of a fragmented family as they struggle with the harsh realities of poverty, depression, and dysfunction. The story opens with Jonah, a troubled, self-involved boy in a small South Dakota town. Raised by a depressed and suicidal mother who never wanted him, he survives an attack from the family's Doberman only to be severely scarred on his face and hands. Jonah develops into a lonely and isolated man who tries to make connections with anyone willing to befriend him, only to push others away by eventually demanding more than they want to give. Driven by his need for acceptance, Jonah seeks out an older half brother who was given up for adoption at birth. Troy, a bartender and occasional marijuana dealer, has difficulties of his own: shortly after the disappearance of his wife, he is arrested and placed on probation and house arrest for drug dealing. He struggles to regain custody of his son, Loomis, a strangely intelligent and watchful boy, from his uncooperative mother-in-law and has little time for the hopeful Jonah. In what he intends as a gesture of brotherly friendship, Jonah kidnaps Loomis, meaning to take the boy to Troy. This desperate act ultimately leads to the dramatic yet real conclusion. A series of tightly interwoven flashbacks; deft handling of structure; and simple, precise language transform these characters' lives into a story that is highly readable, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345441419
• ISBN-13: 978-0345441416
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #636,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon's fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Reconciliation, May 13, 2006

By 

kjgrow (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Remind Me of Me: A Novel (Paperback)

Looking at the other reviews here, I see that readers are either falling all over themselves or reacting very negatively to this book. Clearly, this is a novel that provokes strong feelings in people. So instead of gushing about the prose (which I do think is poetic and lovely) or railing on the characters (which are, for the most part, miserable... but some people like that kind of thing), I thought I'd try to identify some of the elements of this book that readers might find either enriching or problematic.

1) Structure - Dan Chaon is first and foremost a short story writer, and this comes through quite clearly in this book. Much like an Arriaga screenplay (21 Grams, Amores Perros) the chronology and cast of characters are fragmented and require a bit of piecing together in the beginning. In fact, I kept a timeline for the first ten chapters just to keep myself straight. While some people may enjoy this puzzle, others might find it gimmecky and unnecessary and not have the patience to continue reading.

2) Predominace of storytelling by way of characters' interior -
One reviewer I believe called this novel "claustrophobic", which I think is a pretty apt word. This is not a novel of plots and dialogues - most of the story is revealed through the memories and thoughts of a variety of characters. Very little happens directly in this novel, resulting in a sort of slowness, or lack of immediacy. Here again, some readers will savor this richness and pace, and others will find it aggrivating.

3) Tendancy toward melodrama and sentimentality - Remember the books in the first round of Oprah's book club (Jane Hamilton, Wally Lamb, etc.)? This book is ripe for this audience. This can be a very dark book, seemingly hopeless at times. But it is a perspective that many people find truth and redemption in. For others, this way of looking at the world is pessimistic and depressing.

All said and done, I did enjoy this book, and my book group had a very long and involved discussion about it. I can't say that I'm going to run out and buy the rest of Chaon's work, but I do give him credit for being a gifted and unconventional writer that seems to be resonating with many, many people.

For a book with similar themes, but a different edgier approach, try Eliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Reminds Me Of "Masterful"!, July 28, 2005

By 

Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Remind Me of Me: A Novel (Paperback)

This book was extraordinary...a book that revived my faith that the novel is here to stay. The theme -- in Chaon's own words: "How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branches into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddeing outward and outward like sheer lightning."

That's solid writing by a master in control of the process. The novel is, ultimately, about choices and alternate lives: what would happen if you were born to a different mother? If you'd grown up in a different place? If you had some kind of proof that you were unlucky? These are questions that we all wrestle with at some point in our lives; Jonah more than most.

There is ample foreshadowing that "something is wrong with Jonah": his child demeanor, the way he deals with the dog Rosebud as an adult, his own lack of involvement at the time of his mother's death. It is inevitable, then, that his appearance in Troy's life will eventually create what appears to be a crisis.

Each character is carefully drawn, even the minor ones. I could picture each one -- the twitches, the yellowing sheets, the gnarled hands, and most of all, the scar which, of course, is symbolic of the schism that runs through Jonah's life.

I highly recommend this novel!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A visual and griping story, March 5, 2005

By 

Philip D. Tasho "PT" (Alexandria,VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Remind Me of Me (Hardcover)

Dan Chaon has a unique style that is both visual(I could see the movie playing in my head) and poetic(his use of words is beautiful). While I did not like most of the characters, I appreciate the complete sketch that Mr. Chaon paints of these characters' bleak lives. Troy Timmens is probably the fullest real character we see and in my opinion the most comprehensible. The book is midly disturbing and depressing, however, I recommend it for the beautiful and unique style and the griping story.