Await Your Reply — by Dan Chaon

Who are you?

That's the question Dan Chaon implicitly asks in his new book, and reading it will either confirm your sense that you're not the person you thought you were or leave you feeling exhilarated about the freedom you have to be whomever you like.

Within limits.

But the thing is, the limits are malleable and permeable by not much more than a wish or a dream or a nightmare, and therein lies the rub.

Although the book's ending — much ballyhooed in reviews as perfect and its ilk — baffled me (something that's always, in truth, been the case for me, what with my habit of believing everything and thinking anything's possible, which lack of filtering invariably results in blatant contradiction), that didn't make reading it any less absorbing.

It was another past 2 a.m.-er, what with the impossibility of putting it down before finding out how things played out.

It's always amazing to me how a story about losers and dead-enders can end up being a winner.

I guess that's the magic of a good writer, the ability to let you inhabit, if only for a while, the mind and consciousness of another person entirely alien to oneself.

One project of mine over the past few months has been trying (without success, methinks) to become Gray Cat, see the world as she does and experience things from her point of view.

I sometimes lie down right next to her and look at what she's looking at and try to do a mind-meld with her cat brain but so far nada.

If only I had fur and whiskers to make the incoming more realistic....

The closest I've ever come to being a cat was reading Jack Williamson's 1948 sci-fi classic, "Darker Than You Think."

I love how Chaon's last name is only a letter away from chaos, which is what the world he depicts ultimately devolves into.

Read the first pages and/or look inside the book here.

Read/download a 13 page excerpt here.

Watch a trailer here.