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The circumstances of life –
The events of life –
The people around me in life –
Do not make me the way I am.
They reveal the way I am.
For the first one hundred pages of “Await Your Reply”, I was about as enthusiastic about this novel as I have been about any book I’ve read this year. I have read Dan Chaon’s previous novel “You Remind Me of Me” and his collection of stories “Among the Missing”, both of which I liked very much. Chaon has a way of making ordinary life seem strange and wondrous which reminds me of Anne Tyler, high praise indeed.
Dan Chaon was born in Nebraska and lives near Cleveland, Ohio. Scenes of the novel take place in both of these states as well as many other places.
The novel sets up three small groups of characters very vividly, and I was eagerly waiting what Chaon would do with these characters. My problem with “Await Your Reply” is almost entirely with the plot. The plot is about how these three groups of people become involved with computer identity theft.
Now I’m sure identity theft and computer fraud are huge problems, and I have no reason not to believe as this novel implies that there are teams of people hacking across the computers of the world trying to break into people’s accounts on the computer in order to defraud them out of huge amounts of money. And I have no reason not to believe that sometimes things get very violent between these teams of computer criminals, which this novel also implies. I do think if computer account fraud were commonly occurring, none of us would ever enter our credit card numbers into Amazon or any of the many other places where we purchase items over the computer. Also every local paper in the country would be filled with the forlorn victims of Internet fraud. I think what happened is that a couple of years ago Internet fraud was threatening to get out of control, and these software companies like Amazon, etc., spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the software necessary to protect as from the computer hackers. If they hadn’t, these companies would have been pretty much out of business by now. Then again, these same companies are probably trying to minimize any publicity concerning Internet fraud.
The novel “Await Your Reply” does not at all attempt to point out the implications of Internet fraud for us. This is the opposite approach from Richard Powers who keeps us constantly aware of the importance of the issue he is dealing with in his novel “Generosity”. Instead identity fraud in “Await Your Reply” is just a plot device to move the action along.
I suppose in an action novel, moving the plot and the action along are very important. I guess the bottom line is I don’t see Dan Chaon as an action adventure novelist. I see Dan Chaon more as a character novelist, along the lines of Anne Tyler. For me, the somewhat contrived plot of “Await Your Reply” got in the way, and the characters were not allowed to grow, develop, and interact as I was hoping they would.
I probably will continue to read Dan Chaon since I really enjoy his writing style, but for me “Await Your Reply” was somewhat of a misfire.
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