Troy Timmens is a hard-luck soul. His ex-wife was a hard-core drug addict, and ran off, leaving him with their son, Loomis, a steady, serious, well-behaved little boy. Troy supplements his income working as a bartender with a modest amount of drug selling. When he’s busted one night, his son is given to his mother-in-law, Judy, and he’s placed under house arrest for a year. Judy despises Troy and will not allow him any contact with his son. Troy fears he will not be able to regain custody.
Jonah Dolye is a much harder-luck soul. As a small boy being raised by his ancient grandfather and mentally ill mother, Nora Doyle, Jonah is severely mauled by the family’s Doberman. Years later, after his mother’s suicide, Jonah moves to Chicago with few job skills and fewer social skills, to earn a degree and try to make some social connections. When he fails on both counts, he hires an agency to locate his half-brother, given up for adoption by his mother in the ’60s, in hopes that the biological link will somehow provide him with family.
Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me is about connections, both forged and forced, and about the difficulty of jolting our lives out of a track. It is a very good book, particularly in the carefully drawn characters, but after finishing it, I was struck with how little humor there is in it. At all. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s just surprising to me – you rarely see a book that so steadily refrains from even a single moment of wryness or sarcasm. Both Jonah and Troy get one hard knock after another, but neither of them ever displays a tint of self-aware levity about it all. Chaon’s book questions whether nature or circumstances contributes more to our fate, but perhaps the biggest shared characteristic of Troy and Jonah is their utter inability to step outside themselves for a minute.
