"[A] deliciously disturbing literary thriller...You'll be spellbound from start to finish." - People"Stunning...Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off..." The New York Times
"A riveting thriller, chock-full of plot twists...There's a bristling momentum that develops, as in any great tale of suspense..." Los Angeles Times Book Review
"...Mysteries lurk in this hypnotic novel that you'll never guess." The Washington Post
Moments after finishing Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon my only thoughts on the above snippets of the book's advanced praise is that clearly none of these people actually read it. Or they were too big of literature snobs to praise the obvious elegance of the writing and ignore the giant hole where the plot should have been. Too wrapped up in the melancholy prose, and all too willing to praise it in the absence of any kind of substance, and for what? This is the kind of book that makes me cynically believe that people pay for good reviews. As someone who reads books with a fine-toothed comb, I can assure you that none of the above is actually true in Await Your Reply.
This book had promise. It certainly started off with a bang, Ryan's severed hand resting comfortably in a Styrofoam cooler as it rushed from a remote rural cabin in Michigan to the nearest hospital. But like the setting in of Gangrene, the book quickly veered into vague territory, providing about 85% meaningless backstory with the remaining 15% dedicated to the plot. It was one of those books where I imagined taking a Sharpie to every pointless sentence and winding up with something only about 30-pages long and most-likely exponentially more interesting. Where the Reader's Guide at the end praised the unorthodox structure of the book, something that should have added dimension to the story, it actually ended up making the book a lot more effort than it was worth. There is a lot of information - and fragment sentences - for the reader to wade through with very little payoff in the end, which is disappointing because the surprises and plot twists have the potential to make an actual impact. Instead, the "big reveal," is clouded by, "Wait...wha...?" It might be most beneficial to read this book in a Reading Group so that, like driving in a dense fog, people might be able to see and explain things that might not be clear to others, and vice versa.
Also in the Reader's Guide, Chaon boasts of thinking of novels as puzzles that need to be completed, but, unfortunately, Await Your Reply fell drastically short and comes off like it's missing several pieces. It is an inelegantly disjointed depressing walk through the mostly random memories of over three people who are interconnected, but not really. The actual plot is built on a rocky foundation of assumptions and conjecture with shockingly little information for the reader that would move the story forward. Instead, we get an overage of information that we don't need, and already know, like the over-explanation of highway memorials.
Purchased from the Dollar Tree about a year ago, and chosen from my bookshelf because I was in the mood for a good mind-fuck, I was given one, but was left largely unsatisfied and like it was a pointless waste of time, especially since I chose it over a soon-to-be-due library book by my all-time favorite author. As the David Frost poem Chaon cleverly inserted, probably to up his literary game in the likes of something actually New York Times-worthy, goes: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-"
Thank goodness I will next travel down the path I should have taken in the first place...
