![]() ![]() Michael would seem to have inherited his father’s strain of suicidal depression. It’s Michael who largely serves to bring the story forward from Margaret’s 1960s feminism to contemporary trends in American identity politics. Michael, the couple’s oldest son, is arguably the novel’s central character. The scene is graphic but beautifully rendered. He mentally shuts down again, and kills himself in an early chapter. Back in America, fifteen years and three children later, John fails himself and his family as an entrepreneurial venture capitalist. Thus the limits of Margaret’s love begin to be tested right from the start. There are soon signs of danger, however, as John falls into a mute depression even before the nuptials. Margaret’s feminism takes her to England where she meets and becomes engaged to a Brit named John. Even the family’s most conventional character-Margaret, the much-burdened matriarch-asserts, “I’m not a doll in the house of my mother’s imaginings. With this novel of familial strife, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee Adam Haslett moves beyond cliché and immerses Imagine Me Gone in contemporary ideas about racial and economic justice in America-he does so by having each of the five family members serve as alternating narrators. ![]() To sum up Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown) as a novel about an affluent family’s struggle with mental illness is to make it sound far more predictable than it actually is. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |