The best fiction I have read has always made me forget the name of the author the fastest. The lightest moment in Adam Haslett’s 2002 collection of short stories You Are Not a Stranger Here was when the frenzied, old inventor exposes himself at the Ruebenses. What remained captivating about all the stories, even the ones too violent to swallow, was the feeling of being in an anechoic chamber, with the characters appearing clearly, one after another, without the distractions of any other noise. When I picked up Imagine Me Gone , all I knew was that whatever Adam Haslett had to say would put me back in a soundless room and the characters would lead me down a few corridors I dare not walk down alone.
The story, originally titled Kindness follows the fortunes of a middle-class family. John, who is ‘a showman when he is on, capable of great largesse’ is from England, and his American wife, Margaret, lays stake to John’s heart because ‘No woman had ever looked at me as directly as she did’. Before marrying John, Margaret encounters one episode of his debilitating depression but marries him anyway. They have three children, Michael, Celia and Alec, and some respite from the darkness through the years as the children grow up. John is an amiable husband and a loving father, so attached to his son Michael that he has premonitions of any harm that might befall his first-born. At one point, he has a sense, which manifests as a headache, that Michael has hit his head by tripping down the stairs when the family temporarily shifts to Battersea even before Margaret calls him at his office to tell him that Michael has indeed had a fall. John also senses that the cloak that plagues him and unhinges him from the normality of the world around him also invisibly hovers over Michael. When John decides to take his life, at a time when Michael is a teenager studying in London, we come to the second act where Michael’s mental illness, from which he finds respite only in his encyclopedic love for music and books, is being treated with a mountain of drugs. He struggles through college and through sparse, unattainable romantic attachments. In the meanwhile, his siblings Celia and Alec make it through college before him, find jobs, and struggle with their own perceptions of permanence in their relationships after their father’s death and their older brother’s declining state.
Told in alternating voices of the characters, there are some genuinely funny revelations in Michael’s recollection of events, including a family therapy session where the four surviving members gather to discuss their emotional health after John’s death. It is clear that the whole family sees Michael as a cause not to be compromised despite the heavy toll it takes on everyone’s lives. Celia, going through an abortion, partially unconvinced about her partner, is fully convinced that Michael is her top priority, but it is Michael himself who is most acutely aware of his condition. He summarises the meeting with the psychotherapist with a bullet point reading: ‘There is a point in all wars of attrition when the combatants begin to suspect that their purpose is not at all what they believed it to be, that in fact the war is its own organism.’
A little further ahead, you discover that past his attention-grabbing ways as a child, Alec (a journalist) inherits his love for music and the written word from his brother and blames himself for not waking up earlier on the day John died. When he is almost 36, Michael finds himself living with his mother, after a failed attempt at graduate school. One night, the endless list of medications causes complications and Margaret hesitates to call an ambulance (she has already started to think about selling her own house, being unable to pay Michael’s debts). And the situation escalates to a point where Alec convinces Michael that he needs to change things. Alec takes his brother back to a cabin in Maine they used to visit as children, intending to heal his dependence on drugs over a course of many months, reducing his medication gradually. Alec takes Michael on walks, talking to him as much as he needs him to, and even slow-dancing with him in the living room one night just to reassure him. It is here that the story comes to a tragic end after a conversation the brothers have one night (when Michael is completely off medication) about Thomas Mann, Gustav Aschenbach and Proust.
Just when you think you can come up for air as you turn the last few pages, Margaret is getting Celia ready for her wedding. Celia tells her that she envies Margaret sometimes ‘with the weather and all those dates you remember, enjoying all of that, those little things… It is good you can enjoy it.’ Margaret, who measures time by the milestones passed by the family she so loves, is reminded of her first conversation with John, with a sense of wonder and not sadness. In celebrating the living, past the haunting echoes of the dead, Margaret stands out as the most unlikely of ship captains.
The story took my breath away and made for a fascinating, 356-page treasure hunt.
Imagine Me Gone ; Adam Haslett, Hamish Hamilton, Rs. 1,352.
Anu Vaidyanathan is a lost soul and the author of Anywhere but Home .
She tweets at @anuvaidyanathan
