You Remind Me of Me: A Novel

By Dan Chaon

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 25, 2004
• ISBN: 9780345478719

Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon is the author of several books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O. Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.

Reviews for You Remind Me of Me

[wordsampersand · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dan Chaon is the best. This may be "literary fiction," but it's as unsettling as horror fiction.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Digital audio performed by Jim Soriero.Chaon was already known as a talented writer of short stories when this debut novel was published. His background with that shorter form shows in this book. The first four chapters of the book introduce us to four different characters and time frames: 1977 and six-year-old Jonah is mauled by the family pet; 1978 and ten-year-old Troy is hanging out with teenagers smoking pot; 1966 and teenaged Nora is about to give birth at a home for unwed mothers; 1997 and six-year-old Loomis disappears from his grandmother’s backyard. Eventually the connections between them will be clear to the reader.What I really like about Chaon’s writing is how he explores issues of identity, how characters are shaped by their environment, by chance and opportunity, and by the choices they make. There is much to dislike about these damaged people, and yet I am drawn to these characters and their stories. I am distressed by the loneliness they endure and the wrong paths they take, and yet still find some hope for the future. The changing time frames and points of view do, however, make for a somewhat confusing experience. This is especially true for those who choose the audio version.Jim Soriero does an excellent job performing the audio. He is a skilled voice artist, with good pacing. Still, given the nonlinear plot, I’m glad I had a text version available so I could go back and reference earlier chapters easily.

[amymerrick · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"There was no way to account for love, she thought, or for sorrow."Dan Chaon's gifts as a short-story writer show themselves in his exquisitely crafted sentences, as in this passage from the novel's opening:"In the movie you would only see him emerging from the bus, a boy running with his backpack dragging through the wet gravel, a red stocking cap, a worn blue ski jacket, stones grinding together beneath his boots, a pleasantly rhythmic noise he was making. And you would be up above everything like a bird, the long gravel road that led from the mailbox to the house, the weeds along the ditches, the telephone poles, barbed-wire fences, railroad tracks. The horizon, the wide plain of dust and wind."In this story of two half-brothers trying to make sense of the small and large failures of their lives, Chaon is sensitive to the subtleties of personality. He dwells in melancholy; he is well acquainted with sadness and longing. He is painfully honest about the complexities of relationships and shows us how people really feel about each other, how they struggle and fail to hide those feelings.The characters feel like real people -- so real, in fact, that they can become as boring as stretches of real life. They change and make decisions at a glacial pace. They can be so passive that the book becomes a dreamscape, where nothing that happens has deeply felt consequences.The chronology skips around frequently, sometimes for recognizable reasons of structure and pacing, sometimes not. I understand the novel's recursive style fits the theme of desperately wanting to remake the past, but honestly, after a while I wanted to take a pair of scissors to the whole thing and straighten it out.I admire the book for Chaon's facility with language and his willingness to look at people's motives and failures unflinchingly. The beginning and ending, where he apparently spent most of his energy, are as beautiful and moving as his short stories.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to weep at the end of this book, not for any specific character or event - just for all the lost souls out there in general.

[addictedtomorphemes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good but slow read. Difficult at times to keep track of events because there is a lot of jumping around chronologically. Worth the read, however, as you can get sucked in by the miserable circumstances these people live through. It's one that showcases how some lives are just lived with no real bright spots or great shining moments. Life is hard, but it can be exceptionally hard for some unfortunate souls. Some people just don't get a break.This story ties together the lives of a young pregnant teenager in the 60s, sent to a home for unwed mothers, a young boy savagely attacked by the family Doberman and left with terrible scars he will carry for the rest of his life, and a young father struggling to support his son and young cousin after his wife leaves him. Delves into the question of how different (better?) a person's life could have ended up if they started out with a different family.

[edgoldberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On the back jacket of You remind me of me, an author describes the book as "....one of the strangest, most beautiful, most compelling books I've read in a long time." I'd have to agree with Elizabeth McCracken. It is most certainly strange or bizarre, beautiful yet unnerving and quite compelling.Chaon, author of the National Book Award finalist Among the Missing, takes four apparently disparate stories and unites them in a bizarre, sad tale of dysfunctional human nature.I'll describe the characters and leave the interweaving of their stories to Chaon. Jonah is six in 1977 when he comes home to his grandfather's Little Bow, South Dakota house after school and is mauled by their doberman, Elizabeth.In the same year, in St. Bonaventure, Nebraska 10 year old Troy Timmens, is watching his cousin Bruce and his wife Michelle get high while also babysitting their toddler Ray.In 1966, Nora, a pregnant fifteen year old is contemplating her life while in the Mrs. Glass Home for unwed pregnant teens.Finally, in 1997 St. Bonaventure, a six year old child disappears from his grandmother's backyard during the instant when she wasn't watching him.Chaon weaves these unique, disturbing stories into a complete tapestry full of dysfunctionality, missteps and misdeeds. Sad characters and lives abound in You remind me of me. But these characters are real, not far fetched visions of people readers can't comprehend. Chaon's prose has a cadence and the pictures of locales and actions are vivid; the small towns, the desolation, the loneliness.You remind me of me is like no story you've ever read before. Be prepared for a bizarre, uncomfortable but compelling read.

[eliz12_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dan Chaon has a spectacular command of the English language. I love the way he uses just a few words to create an unforgettable image (someone was described as "murdering a shirt" when he cut it to shreds).My issue here is with the story. Sometimes I found it very touching (the first chapters), but about 2/3 of the way into the book I felt curiously unmoved by and uninterested in all the characters' lives.

[periodista_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"I think it's a little late for me to become a different person."As Troy says to his young (smarter, more ambitious, brighter) son Loomis. But of course it's the issue haunting the three major characters in this book--Troy, Jonah, their blood mother Norah, possibly also Troy's wayward wife, Carla, and Troy's nephew, Ray. Jonah bats it around in one of his rambling conversations (for lack of a better word) with Troy. He says something to the effect of ... it's not nature or nurture, it's just a toss of the dice that you were dealt better cards in life--and if I had them, I would have played them better.Another theme: the compelling idea of connection with other human beings.Ultimately, I think Chaon comes down to that view too. Given his parents and early upbringing, there's no reason that Loomis is headed on a solid path and has been since early childhood. Ray's early familial circumstances weren't much different; he seems like a layabout pothead/dealer at the time of Troy's arrest, without even the grounding and purpose that Loomis gives Troy. But with the proceeds of the drug stash, he ends up as the savvy investor and business owner! Then, of course, there's that final card from Jonah in Jamaica: hell, if this guy can change that dramatically, who else can't? Except we also know that Jonah has been a prodigal liar. He may well be in Jamaica but in college? Could be in jail again.I admire Chaon's writing and wisdom but there were two major shortcomings in this novel. First, Norah. I don't think Chaon can get inside the heads of his female characters. While it's true that Jonah and Troy are the major characters when we do light on Norah, it is her POV. It was all so airy vague--how she got pregnant, what she felt about these men. It might make sense why she didn't tell her father the name of Troy's faher; maybe her father would have forced a marriage or shot the guy. But why does she tell him nothing of Jonah's blood or legal father? Her father seems like a nice enough, gentle, sympathetic man. At some point, she'd needa shoulder to cry on. What's Norah's problem exactly? How does she see the world and her future? What exactly was wrong with the blood or legal father of Jonah?In a related matter: the unwed mother's home. The rule that the girls would be forbidden to talk to each other is incredible enough. But that a bunch of teenage girls--already "bad" girls--would obey such a rule?! Right. Sure, it might work if the world of the rest of the novel was also a bit .. fantastical, at a remove from the one we recognize. But the worlds of the other major characters, Troy and Jonah, are quite specific, especially Troy's. This character was so convincing, more complex and committed than would strike you if you met him at the bar or wherever. And of course the details of Elizabeth the dog, the relationship even before the attack.Your lazy, neighborhood dealer/ bartender and yet, he has certain standards (he won't sell coke or harder drugs) and he probably would have become a solid father even if he hadn't been arrested. I was in Loomis's camp: hoping that Troy would take a few college courses or marry a woman who would push him a little more.Final problem was the long, dragged-out final third of the book. Once Jonah headed out to St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, and Loomis was introduced at his grandma's talking to a bush, I knew what was going to happen. There was a lot of excess here. Once we know Jonah woke up with a hangover at Troy's, do we later need to see it from Troy's POV?To end on a high note, I was especially touched by Chaon's depiction of Jonah struggling to be that new person in Chicago. Some of that is familiar: we expect the rube to discover a new self in books and learning. And he doesn't! Sometimes it doesn't work. Making the connection with the couple, becoming too relaxed and overstepping the boundaries. You know it instantly but it's too late to take it back.

[casualfriday_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was crazy about Chaon's latest, Await Your Reply. This one, his first novel, has a similar structure in that it tells a story through three different characters, and similar questions about identity and sense of self, but it has a completely different tone. It's way more heart than head, and very disturbing and sad. It's about two half-brothers, unknown to each other until adulthood, and about the mother who gave one of them up. These characters are all emotionally broken and profoundly unloved and unmothered. A great holiday read!

[semckibbin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This Ballantine Books edition has appended to it an interesting interview with Chaon. In it, the author confirmed my suspicion: He had no idea what he was doing as he wrote the novel. Chaon just started typing and thought a novel would pop out, like in kindergarten when you are given a silkworm and it starts spinning its cocoon and the moth naturally follows. This lack of planning required the editor, Smetanka, to get very involved in the novel’s construction; so to be fair, I will marry the two and refer to Chaon-Smetanka as the author. The marriage led to a mid-stream change to the narrative stance, ending up with a series of semi-omniscient third-person narrators that can read character’s thoughts and know some future events, but frustratingly dont know the history of St. Podunk, Nebraska. Usually it’s one narrator per chapter, but in one chapter Chaon-Smetanka daringly switched narrators back and forth, and even had an independent authorial narrator state that the other two narrators had the identical thoughts about a little toddler dying in a freezer, right down to knowing the freezer’s storage capacity to a tenth of a cubic foot. (Before I leave that horrific scene I should say Chaon-Smetanka’s gratuitous killing of little fictional Joshua is cheap, unforgivable manipulation of the reader. The description is only there to make us think, Oh please dont let that happen to little fictional Loomis! In my view an artist would never do that, for an artist would understand that Joshua and his mother’s suffering is just as important, just as terrible, as Loomis‘s.) The language is bland American. The main characters merely drift along, and Chaon-Smetanka balance the aimless main narrative with equally pointless manufactured drama. Red herrings. The most boring of these red herrings were whether Troy could drive home from work in ten minutes and Jonah asking somebody to move his car. Oh, sure, there were some decent parts. I especially delighted in Jonah’s doberman being reincarnated to assist the police in chasing and punishing the kidnapper. And there was development of some themes: The unhappy leaves; the gravel; and the curlicue, unraveling, unwinding spiral motif that paralleled Jonah’s predictable unraveling. In the interview Chaon says the seed of the novel is his wife’s response to his own (and I think, boring) fixation on nature versus nurture---his wife observed “people invent themselves”. That’s a good insight. For example, Nietzsche’s body of work and Proust’s narrator present two celebrated examples of how to invent one’s self----they both propose that a self could be invented through articulate art. It is a very interesting subject; lots of things to mine here. But development of the “invented self” theme was beyond Chaon-Smetanka. It seems to me the theme could not be explored because Chaon-Smetanka chose to saddle themselves with Jonah and Troy, two dreary, inarticulate, unreflective characters, who the author proceeds to cut off from the world (no father, mother, wife or kid, only the most bleak and undemanding kind of job). The two characters are incapable of action, and without action, as I’ve learned from Nietzsche and Proust, you cannot “become what one is”. Nor are characters that have invented themselves introduced to contrast with Troy and Jonah. Instead, we are only given a simplistic behaviorist model of the self; in Jonah’s case bad wiring, a lack of maternal love and a loaded dog going off made him into a sociopath, borderline psychopath. There is no interesting psychology (like a Freudian unconscious) to explain why Jonah might act differently than the third-person narrator’s report of his beliefs and desires. The characters are beaten down; Jonah believes he had “not been born significant” and at 36 Troy believes it is “too late to become a different person”. Maybe in Jonah’s notebooks is that invented self, but alas we are given no writing samples. I think Chaon-Smetanka has merely provided us with two examples of how to fail to invent who one is. Failure can be instructive, but given the dismal mental life of these characters, it isnt interesting. Please authors, do not talk about your work in public! If you are quiet we just may charitably credit the final product with achieving your grand design.

[suesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent character development. I felt I knew the characters and cared about them. These are humans I do not often encounter in fiction, and I cared about them and felt that I knew them. Their motivations were real and not limited to these characters. I wondered if the lack of chronology was a device, but I thought it really added to the story.

[angella4beshara · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An excellent first novel, with an ambitious and successfully executed structure that spans thirty years and five points of view. The strong writing and fresh takes on the familiar themes of identity and family relationships made me forgive this book some flaws I probably would have had more serious problems with in any other book. Primarily, I found keeping track of the numerous characters difficult at the beginning and Jonah's character felt too broad at times. I found myself wanting something good to happen to Jonah throughout and it was painful each time he made a stupid mistake. Also, I am sure Chaon didn't intend us to buy the note he sends to Troy at the end and although that is true to Jonah's character it feels a little too tidy.The thoughtful and insightful examination on self invention and personal connections makes this book so worth reading. Beware though the first chapter is a little hard for dog lovers to read and if it weren't for the strong images and provocative first sentence I am not sure I would have read past that.

[bookwormteri · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

One of the most dreary books that I have read in a long while. I didn't think that any of the characters were likable and just found the whole book tiresome.

[griff_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An unsettling book. A difficult reminder of how dysfunctional some families can be.

[mzonderm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book reminded me a lot of The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton, probably because they both take place in small towns, and they're both pretty depressing and about dysfunctional families. This book jumps back and forth in time, showing how the various characters are related (literally) and Chaon does a good job of bringing together the various storylines into an interesting, if not altogether unpredictable, denouement.

[megans_361455 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

No stars for this book. Didn't really like it - couldn't relate to either of the main characters. Off to the charity shop with this one!