Temple and the Literary Hub staff picked the twenty best novels of the decade. One title on the list:
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (2016)Read about another entry on the list.
This was one of those novels I had to be told multiple times to read. I just didn’t want to read a sad book about depression! And to be fair ... it is sad. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one.
Adam Haslett’s second novel is a full and frank portrait of a family and the mental illness that besieges its members—some genetically, others merely experientially. It’s no more complicated than that—there’s no hook, no high concept twist, just the story of a family, told over the years and through the lens of each member: John, Margaret, and their (adult) children Michael, Celia, and Alec. Michael is the most intense narrator, and the one who has inherited his father’s “beast,” though in him it is changed into an obsessive, endlessly riffing master. In fact, Michael’s writing shows up quite a bit in the novel, and it’s one of the book’s best parts—a direct lens, as it were, into a highly unusual mind.
Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms. This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful.
–Emily Temple, Senior Editor
Imagine Me Gone is among Saskia Lacey's fifty incredible literary works destined to become classics.
The Page 69 Test: Imagine Me Gone.
--Marshal Zeringue
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