Adam Haslett will be at University Book Store tonight at 7 pm.
Adam Haslett will be at University Book Store tonight at 7 pm. I will join him in conversation. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Imagine Me Gone is extraordinary, gripping, devastating novel narrated by five members of a family.

One of them is a suicidally ill father.

Another is his son, Michael, a white male character so racked with guilt and sadness about the horrors of white supremacy that he can hardly function. Except that Michael is also the funniest character in the book—it's gruesome how hilarious and self-mocking and earnest he can be simultaneously, like when he's filling out an intake questionnaire at a psychiatrist's office and he answers the first three questions like this:

What are the problem(s) you are seeking help for?
1. Fear
2. Trembling
3. Individualism
4. White supremacy

What are your treatment goals?
1. Ordinary happiness
2. Racial justice

Current symptoms:
Yes

As Rich Smith said in his review of Imagine Me Gone, Michael is "one of the most interesting literary characters I’ve come across in a long while." Rich goes on to say:

He’s a Klonopin-popping white guy dedicated to African American studies who advocates for sensible reparations policies as he works on his theory that black music is a vehicle for the inherited trauma of slavery. (His descriptions and defenses of disco and electronic music/dub are A+.) He exclusively loves and sleeps with black women, but he’s desperate to keep the tools, as it were, of white supremacy and patriarchy out of the bedroom, a goal he finds difficult to achieve...

Like some kind of giant panda, Michael spends his days chewing through music and language, trying to extract the trace amounts of dopamine buried in them, seemingly the only things that remind him he has a body.

Haslett is a personal friend of mine, and he has contributed several pieces to The Stranger over the years. After he reads we'll have a conversation onstage together. This essay Haslett recently wrote about the solitary life of writers will be our starting point.

University Book Store, 7 pm, more details here.