Haslett, as he turns the narrative over to first one and then the other, is uncanny in nailing how their differences in personality and temperament guide their respective actions.

Alec, Celia, and Margaret all have their own ideas of what might help him out. Requests from him for advice are really demands that someone rubber-stamp all the bad moves he makes in his love life and career.Ī perennial graduate student and penniless music writer, Michael is on a heavy-duty regimen of psychoactive drugs that calm his anxiety for a while, but can’t make him functional on a long-term basis. A call from him guarantees hours-long sessions on the phone. She tries to help Michael with his problems by giving him money she can ill afford. Margaret’s approach is to sweat the small stuff while avoiding larger issues. But it wasn’t just sex.” The key thing for him is to know a man is paying attention to him: “hat more was there to want than that?”ĭaughter Celia’s strategy is to flee to faraway San Francisco and live on guarded terms with a man she hopes will “deliver me from my family, rather than imitate it.” His shocked wife and three children cope in different ways.Īlec, a political journalist, seeks out urgent sexual connection: “I loved men.

His fantastically lurid account of the family’s move from the United States to England, in which the ship goes off course to Africa and his younger brother, Alec, is ostensibly kidnapped by a child prostitution ring, suggests he may have inherited his father’s mental instability.Īfter a business failure in London, John moves the family back to Massachusetts where he suffers more career disasters and goes into a full downward spiral, culminating in his suicide. Michael, the eldest, is the kind of kid who wields his precocious vocabulary against the grown-ups around him like a weapon (“What are you cogitating about?”). Over the next 40 years, as they move back and forth between England and Massachusetts, the consequences of her decision play out. The breakdown isn’t his first, she learns, and she has to decide whether to go through with their planned marriage. When John suffers a mental collapse, however, it grows clear that something other than cultural difference is at work. They’re powerfully drawn to each other but can’t accurately interpret each other, perhaps because of their different nationalities.Īt least that’s how Margaret explains the elusive elements in John: “He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. After a prologue that hints a little heavily at where the story is heading, Haslett turns the narrative over to Margaret, an American from Massachusetts who, in 1963, meets her future husband John in London.

Imagine me gone book review