What if you were born into a different family? That very notion—how nature, nurture, and the fates that determine them both, shape one's life—courses through Dan Chaon's (pronounced "Shawn") highly anticipated first novel, You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine, June).
In the striking initial scenes of the book, six-year-old Jonah is attacked by his family's Doberman pinscher. It's an incident that scars him for life, in ways both visible and not. By the time Jonah grows into a sullen, lonely teenager, he has learned that his embittered and troubled single mom had another illegitimate son, whom she gave up for adoption before Jonah was born. His mother's suicide provides Jonah the perfect opportunity to leave the only home he has known and search for his long-lost older brother. The ensuing chapters offer flashbacks and alternating looks at both brothers' separate lives until they dovetail in a reunion that's as dramatic and strange as it is poignant.
Though You Remind Me of Memarks Chaon's maiden voyage as a novelist, it arrives in the wake of his acclaimed 2001 short story collection Among the Missing (Ballantine), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and produced the O. Henry Prize—winning tale "Big Me." Chaon's official fiction debut actually came several years before 2001, with the collection Fitting Ends, originally published by Northwestern University Press in 1995 (Ballantine reissued a revised edition of that book last year.) Praised for his effortless prose, keen insight into the human condition, dark humor and themes of haunting sadness and loss, Chaon has earned comparisons to Russell Banks, an author he names as one of his biggest influences. Chaon's success with the short form has had fans eagerly awaiting a full-length work, and numerous positive reviews indicate that You Remind Me of Meis poised to deliver on this emerging author's early promise.
The leafy suburb of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Chaon lives with his wife (writer Sheila Schwartz) and their two sons (ages 12 and 14) is worlds away from the rundown Nebraska and South Dakota settings of his books. On an unseasonably warm spring day, the author greets PWamid the banging and scraping efforts of a roofing crew repairing his home. A comfortable corner nook at a local coffee shop is a quieter place to talk. "I love my neighborhood," he says, during the short trip down the block. The area has a certain artsy vibe; several universities are in the vicinity and comic book artist/pop culture celebrity Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) lives nearby.
Dressed casually in jeans and black shirt, the 39-year-old Chaon has a subtly boyish appearance, accented by reddish hair and freckles. We ease into a conversation pleasantly punctuated with his warm, throaty laugh. He's refreshingly open about the pieces of his personal history that have colored his work.
Chaon was raised by his adoptive parents in rural Nebraska, the oldest of three children growing up in the late '60s and '70s. From as early as he can remember, Chaon showed a flair for what "wasn't so much writing as it was making stuff up," he says. "We lived in a very rural area where there weren't a lot of other kids, and I spent a lot of time involved in pretty elaborate pretend games," he recalls.
A seventh-grade creative-writing project served as a catalyst for Chaon to make a habit of putting pen to paper. "When I was 13, one of our assignments was to write to an author we admired," Chaon says. "I wrote to Ray Bradbury, and he wrote back to me. I had sent him some of my stories—which were slavish imitations of Ray Bradbury stories—and he was very complimentary and encouraged me to pursue writing. I was growing up in a family where I was the only person that went to college, and I think that [encouragement] was something that I needed as a sort of model, to say OK, I could do this if I wanted."
In the early '80s, Chaon entered Northwestern University aiming to be a film major, picturing himself "a writer-actor-director in the Orson Welles mode, with complete control over telling my story on film." During freshman year, however, "I discovered that you have to collaborate a lot in film, and I wasn't very good at that," he says. "That was when I began to pursue writing more seriously."
Chaon stayed in Chicago for a few years after college before attending the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University, where he worked with Tobias Wolff. "By that time, I had published a couple of stories in literary journals," Chaon says. "I think there is a really long apprenticeship for writers, especially for short story writers. My first collection came out in 1995, and it took me that long to come up with 12 or 13 stories that were halfway decent."
As Chaon was forming the work that would become Fitting Ends, he was also establishing the rhythms of life as a husband and father. Chaon and his wife met at Northwestern and settled in Cleveland in 1991 when Schwartz began teaching creative writing at Cleveland State University. For several years Chaon did odd jobs in and around his writing. "I worked as a caterer, did administrative assistant work and did construction work. A lot of that was because we wanted to have one parent stay at home with the kids," he says. "I did a lot of the stay-at-home-dad stuff while Sheila was at school and that was a really shaping experience for me. "
Upon its publication, Fitting Ends was warmly received by critics, but Chaon's agent at the time was not enthusiastic about him developing a second collection of stories. "I gave the stories I was working on to my friend [author] Steve Lattimore, and he said, 'You need to drop this agent. This is a good collection. Why don't you send it to my agent.' " Thus began Chaon's working relationship with Noah Lukeman, of Lukeman Literary Management. Lukeman, who also had a Chaon novel in his sights, took a different approach. "I sent the collection to Noah in November [1999]," Chaon explains, "and he asked me to write a proposal for a novel so that he could try to sell it as a two-book deal. By January, he put it up for auction—and I couldn't believe it—it sold in two weeks."
Of the flurry of praise that accompanied Among the Missing, Chaon says, "I'm still sort of dazed by it." However, the experience was also bittersweet. "During the time that the book was coming out and all this amazing stuff was happening, my wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer," he says. "We were going through chemotherapy. I suppose there is a sort of backhanded philosophy of life in that: 'Here's the good thing and here's the bad thing to go along with it.' In a way, if there's a higher power, there's some justice in keeping me from getting too swollen-headed."
Sheila is doing well now and is back teaching, but Chaon understandably characterizes the dark period of her treatments as "a very traumatic time. And it was also the time that I was writing this book. I guess you can feel the slippery, slug slime of doom going over it."
The "strange process" of writing a novel, for Chaon, was made even stranger because it was uncharted territory, accompanied by the challenge of following up a hit in another form. "I had to hand it to Dan Smetanka, who was my editor at Ballantine," says Chaon. (Smetanka has since left the company.) "He was incredibly patient. For a while I really didn't know what I was doing, and he led me through."
Though he was moving away from his stories in form, Chaon did not abandon many of the themes he introduced and developed in his earlier work. "I really wanted to write a novel about the issues of adoption and foster care and I guess the thing that I was curious about is how people become who they are," he notes. "It's a personal question for me, but I didn't want to approach it from an autobiographical standpoint."
Chaon relates a real-life experience that served, in part, as inspiration for protagonist Jonah's fictional journey. "When I was in my late 20s, early 30s, and our kids were starting to get a little older, I started to worry about getting genetic information," Chaon says. "I entered this registry, and it turns out that my birth father was also in the process of trying to find out information. We were in contact and sort of developed a relationship over the ensuing years and got to know one another. "
Issues of identity and connection continued to loom large for Chaon even as he met his birth father. "My [adoptive] dad was a construction worker—an electrician. And he was a smart guy, but there was definitely not the same urge to go to college or be involved in the creative arts. And I thought, OK, it must come from my genetic heritage. I had this whole image of, if I were to ever find my biological parents, they would be very artistic. But my biological father is a construction worker—he's an electrician!"
Chaon continues, "It was my wife who said, 'You invented yourself. And everybody invents their "self." ' I guess having her tell me that may be the core of the novel in some ways: do you invent yourself? How much does nurture matter? How much does nature matter? That guy Jonah is so desperate to invent himself, and he can't quite do it."
Via the novel, Chaon says he was able to explore some of the darker feelings he has about family issues and particularly about the problems of family life in America—custody, child care and adoption—that are especially complicated. "Actually, by the time I was done writing this book, I maybe had a more positive view of family than when I went into it," he says. "There is a kind of salvation in a good family, or in those kinds of family-like connections that people find when they try to recreate some sort of family unit, or sense of home, when they strike out on their own."
Chaon was initially nervous about the unusual structure of the novel . "I started to carve the story up, to bounce around and see how it worked. It forced me to dramatize events. Since I've been working on the book, there have been these movies that play radically with time structure like 21 Gramsand Memento, and I think the method is sort of similar."
Chaon must feel more confident with the longer format. He has signed another two-book contract with Ballantine (both projects are to be novels) where he'll be working with a new editor, Elisabeth Dyssegaard. Since 1998 he has been an associate professor of creative writing (and has been given an endowed chair) at Oberlin College. This summer he was promoting You Remind Me of Me with an eight-city tour and some national media appearances. Come fall, Chaon is taking a year-long sabbatical from teaching to devote time to his next project—a novel he hints may be set "in a small college town in Ohio."
Correction:Last week's interview with Sabina Murray was conducted by PW contributing editor Sybil Steinberg. A production error led to the omission of her byline.
