Michael is more self-consciously literary, often using parody to brilliantly comic effect. John’s wife, Margaret, speaks in homely language that’s earthed in the present tense of the everyday. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs. Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose. The story unfolds slowly in the present, with the scenes of fairly ordinary family life infused with the tense foreboding of expected death. The narrative then leaps back to a childhood holiday on the same island where John, “spiffed up in one of his jaunty summer outfits”, leads his children in a series of exhilaratingly dangerous coastal games. We learn early on that their father, John, killed himself a decade earlier, and that this is perceived as John’s troubling legacy to Michael. The novel opens with the suicide of Michael, who, in the hope of escaping his dependence on prescription drugs, has been taken to a small island off the coast of Maine by his brother Alec. But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur.

There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths. Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle. Union Atlantic was a more overtly topical story set in the corrupt banking and military world of the US after 9/11, told in rougher prose. This is the second novel by the prizewinning American writer Adam Haslett. Life illuminated in this way becomes so intense that a man about to kill himself can rejoice in the precariousness of existence: “How narrowly we all avoid having never been.” All the characters are wordsmiths, who enjoy the sentences they create and have some belief that to find the right words to describe pain is to make it more bearable. The beauty is the magnificence of nature, love and perhaps most of all art: music, with its power to still unhappiness by reaching “the note that the heart pines for”, and language. The pain is the grief of loss, past and future, and the ordeal of daily life for those unable to imbue it with meaning.

R epeatedly in Imagine Me Gone, troubled characters ask themselves how life can be at once so beautiful and so painful.

Imagine me gone book review