Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, is a book that demands an attentive reader to keep up with its pace, but like a confusing thriller film brought to life in text. With three storylines moving fully blast ahead, but constantly interweaving into their own pasts, it leads you wondering where it all leads until the final full stop.
Each storyline contained within the 324 pages seems like it could be a novel all of its own.
We see Miles Cheshire who’s rather obsessed searching for his twin brother, Hayden, who’s been missing for a decade. Miles constantly seems to be nearing the moment he finds his brother, yet Hayden always seems to slip away, escaping to a new place to a new job and leaving Miles wondering where he’s gone yet again.
Then there’s Lucy Lattimore who’s disappeared from Pompey, Ohio where she’s lived with her sister to run away with her former history teacher to a deserted town in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. But, once they are there something doesn’t seem right.
Last, the first perspective one meets opening the book is Ryan Schuyler who’s suddenly unseated from his rather shit life when he learns news that makes him question his whole life. In response, he leaves his college campus, gets on a bus, and, to everyone who once knew him, disappears.
As different and separate as they all seem, every character eventually overlaps in some way, connected by a thread that doesn’t reveal itself until the final section of the novel. Every step of the way is fast and engaging with all the traits of a classic psychological thriller more about relationships and interconnections than crime or danger.
That’s not to say the book isn’t full of hard-to-swallow topics. In fact, the opening pages introduce the reader to the text with the following:
“We are on our way to the hospital, Ryan’s father says.
Listen to me, Son:
You are not going to bleed to death.
Ryan is still aware enough that his father’s words come in through the edges, like sunlight on the borders of a window shade. His eyes are shut tight and his body is shaking and he is trying to hold up his left arm, to keep it elevated. We are on our way to the hospital, his father says, and Ryan’s teeth are chattering, he clenches and unclenches them, and a series of wavering colored lights- greens, indigos- plays along the surface of his closed eyelids.
On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.”
From there, Chaon doesn’t let up on the reader’s nerves till the book’s closed and finished. Besides the unique complexity of his plot, Chaon’s prose keeps the book alive as the thrill of what comes next keeps it rushing forward like the oxygen coming in is the plot and the prose provides the beating, pumping heart.
