Await Your Reply

It seems that I've been on a roll with some fairly good books lately.  And this one is certainly no exception.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon is really hard to classify.  It's fiction, yes.  But it really seems like so much more.  And I realize how hokey that sounds.

This is a story of twin brothers (check!) and identity theft (un-check!), but it's engrossing from the very first page.  Each chapter focuses on different characters and the intrepid dynamics between them.  The story definitely has some twists and turns, and it made me think about things in this modern world that had not yet crossed my mind.  I pulled a few references from my banking days, and I made other connections just from being an American consumer. 

And this Dan Chaon knows how to turn a phrase, let me tell yaz.  Every page was rife with lush imagery and plain ol' addictive storytelling.  Example from page 65:

Nebraska was even worse than Ohio--if such a thing were possible.  There was a soundlessness about this place, she thought, though sometimes the wind made the glass in the windowpanes hum, the wind running in a long exhaled stream through the weeds and dust and dry bed of the lake, and sometimes unexpectedly there would be a very startling sonic boom over the house as a military plane broke the sound barrier, and there was the rattle of the grasshoppers leaping from one weed to the next--

But mostly it was silence, a kind of end-of-the-world hush, and you could feel the sky sealing over you like the glass around a snow globe.