Await Your Reply

Written by Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply tries to raise questions about identity, but unfortunately forgets to develop them, deciding instead to focus its attention on a boring group of shallow, static characters.

The story is told through the eyes of three main characters: we follow Lucy’s point of view, a student who ran away with her history professor, George, with the promise of getting rich; but also the young Ray, who discovers he is adopted and, after running away from home, finds his biological father and enters the world of crime; and finally, we have the bitter Miles, who is searching for his twin brother, Hayden, and one day acquires new clues as to his whereabouts.

Lucy’s point of view is the most tiresome of the three. The narrative informs us that she is very intelligent and hard-working, stating, for example, that she didn’t go to renowned universities like Harvard only because the world is an unfair place that doesn’t reward competent people. However, there is an enormous mismatch between how she is described and how she actually acts in the book. Her wisdom, for example, is already called into question when we see her abandoning her whole life for a man she barely knows, which is always a very dangerous idea, to say the least. To make matters worse, Lucy starts to reveal that she cares much more about the professor’s money than his personality: she ran away with him to be rich, not because she liked George – and she believes George is being truthful about his fortune just because of his poise, robust vocabulary, and expensive car.

Lucy also displays a lot of annoying traits, such as a great dose of passivity – she expects George to do everything for her, from cooking, driving, and buying groceries to even making plans about their future –; a needy and paranoid personality – when she wakes up one day and doesn’t find him at her side, she feels betrayed and abandoned –; and futile worries – during what should be the book’s climax she is… buying shoes. Lucy, then, easily tires us with her long observations of what’s happening around her, which vary from repetitive to irrelevant.

Ray’s plot, however, is not much better. The young man’s backstory bears many similarities to Lucy’s, and there are several thematic connections between the two: they both left their previous lives behind, feel lost in the world, are relatively recent orphans, and face problems of identity – questioning their own and of those around them.

His stay with his biological father is one of constant learning and tension, since his father uses false identities to apply scams, which means a financially fulfilled but emotionally stressful life, which requires them to be always on alert, fearing they’re going to be discovered. The narrative doesn’t go into detail about their robberies, the scams, and the process of forging documents: its interest lies only in the philosophical aspect behind the situation. Examples of the questions raised are: a) Does the constant exchange of identities dilute an individual’s original personality? b) When you love a person based on a false personality are you loving a lie?

Await Your Reply’s main problem lies in the fact that these questions are discarded as soon as they are raised, since the characters don’t really care about them: Lucy, for example, doesn’t love George; her real concern is whether or not he has access to the fortune he claims to have. That is, if the professor is not who he says he is in relation to his personality, the revelation will only be uncomfortable for Lucy, as long as he didn’t also lie about his wealth. Ray, in turn, is too practical to worry about general philosophy; he just wants to be competent in his father’s craft. Occasionally, he remembers his old life and researches people’s reactions to his disappearance, but that means nothing but a foolish attempt to check if he was loved there.

A striking example of the book’s problem lies near the end, when Ray reflects on whether or not it would be cruel of him to return to his adoptive parents’ home years after his disappearance, as they could have already overcome their loss. The boy raises the question, but doesn’t take it further, merely cogitating to ask the opinion of a random man about it. In other words, the novel only asks the questions, with no intention to open a debate around them or offer any answer, which makes the book’s title ironic in a sad way. Therefore if the reader offers easy and simple answers, they will have to suffice: for the questions above, for example, we can answer a) no; b) yes; and the discussion will end there.

Miles’ plotline comes close to saving the novel from a total disaster, since, although still anticlimactic, it at least throws additional light on the other characters: his journey shows how people do not live in a vacuum and that those close to them can be negatively affected by their choices. No wonder Miles eventually finds a woman who has also spent her whole life looking for her sister: the narrative connects the two situations to remind the reader of the suffering of Lucy’s and Ray’s family.

The suspense over what happened with Hayden generates some twists and turns which, although honestly foreshadowed, are a little more predictable than they should be. The reason lies in the character’s personality, which, being too eccentric, has some quite striking idiosyncrasies. In other words, after Miles exposes them right at the beginning, it becomes difficult for us not to catch them whenever the character appears hidden behind another identity. However, a much more serious problem than predictability is the lack of dramatic force in the revelations: the twists are designed solely to surprise us, without generating consequences to the plot or the characters.

Finally, the book’s structure also sabotages any tension that the narrative may eventually build by including several moments of pure padding. Even worse than Lucy’s irrelevant trip to a hairdresser near the climax, for example, is an early chapter that has a character reading an entire e-mail from their spam folder. There are few good reasons to watch spam being read, and Await Your Reply, unfortunately, is not one of them.

Failing at developing its main themes, characters, and even the plot twists, Await Your Reply is a complete misfire from author Dan Chaon.

February 18, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on February 03, 2018.