Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino: His films are violent but often hilarious, exulting in the history of cinema, from spaghetti westerns to slasher films to auteurs such as Welles and Kurosawa.
Review: 'Sleepwalk,' by Dan Chaon
FICTION: Dan Chaon's violent, beautiful novel is a triumph of literary genre-bending.
The same can be said of Dan Chaon's brash, exuberant new novel, "Sleepwalk," a Tarantino vibe in book form, with nods to Pynchon-paranoia and Kerouac-style road epic, Greek myths and dystopian fiction. "Sleepwalk" draws on an array of genres and narratives, but it's also a visionary work, a preview of a nation just minutes away.
Will Bear, Chaon's 50-year-old narrator, officially doesn't exist. Raised by a mother on the lam (now deceased), he has no birth certificate, no Social Security number, no Facebook page, "a blank Scrabble piece" who goes by too-many-aliases-to-remember. Will — or Billy, or "the Barely Blur" — drives a camper; his best friend is his pit bull, Flip.
He's still in touch with a childhood friend, Experanza, a cipher and potential threat. He roams the country, microdosing on LSD and doing odd jobs for a shadowy criminal syndicate, "dealers, cultists, conspiracy theorists and militias, radical reactionaries and revolutionists, trolls and goblins and parasites," the seedy underbelly of the American Dream. He pulls off heists, credit-card fraud, even murder — he's his mother's son. He's also laugh-out-loud funny.
His routine is disrupted when a young woman, Cammie, calls him repeatedly on burner phones, claiming to be his biological daughter from a sperm-bank deposit he made in his 20s. He believes she's an AI scam until she laughs exactly like his mother, "the kind of laugh a person makes as they bite down on an apple. There was a xylophone tinkle in it, a conspiratorial glint, a soft caress that made you think she liked you, despite all your failings. A laugh you'd clown for, a laugh you'd drink up like skin drinks sunshine."
"Sleepwalk" is no act of dull somnambulism but rather a vigorous, polished performance by a writer in command of his gifts. Will hits the blue highways, meandering through the Midwest to the desert Southwest to the Carolina coasts — in his sideview mirrors he glimpses a country blistered with military checkpoints, flu epidemics and robot spies.
Despite his blood-soaked sins, Will's an Everydude who strikes a balance between rage, tenderness, and gallows humor as he seeks intimacy from a daughter who may or may not be real. He abides.
His odyssey, like that of Orestes, spirals toward tragedy; there's a creepy noir scene with a chimpanzee that would fit into a David Lynch movie. And yet the novel's intricate structure and seductive voice lift off the page. Will's description of the mysterious Cammie is a spot-on summary of Chaon's method: "She's good at this withhold-and-reveal game, and it reminds me very strongly of the kinds of tall tales and lies and con games my mother would try out on me — how she'd draw you in with something outrageous and then add a little homely detail to give it a dash of realism, how she'd embellish the story in ways that'd make it personal to the listener."
A contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews fiction and nonfiction for a range of venues, including the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.
Sleepwalk
By: Dan Chaon.
Publisher: Henry Holt, 320 pages, $27.99.
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