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You Remind Me of Me

You Remind Me of Me - Dan Chaon Midway through the book, one of the characters imagines writing a letter: Once upon a time there was a woman who had two sons. The first son she gave away when she was a teenager, and she regretted it for the rest of her life. The second son she kept for her own, and she regretted that even more. Now, that's a disturbing but compelling kind of situation to imagine, and if the book had started out there I probably would've devoured it much more eagerly.Instead, Chaon starts slowly and realistically with chapters ranging among Troy (the first son), Jonah (the second), and a few other POVs (their mother Nora, Troy's girlfriend/wife/ex, their son). We don't know who these characters are at first, nor how they're related, let alone why we should be interested in them. Jonah's ugly and dramatic encounter with his mother's pet Doberman is nowhere equaled in the rest of the book, though of course it leave a shadow and (literal) scars all over his later character.A little too often it feels like information is being deliberately withheld to create suspense. (And, yes, I chose to phrase that passively: there's absolutely no authorial presence, no sense of the narrator as a character, just a sourceless voice.) Each chapter's title is a specific date in one of four different decades (from the '60s to the '00s, but somehow skipping the '80s entirely), and the challenge of constructing a chronology and fitting all the events into the puzzle isn't rewarded with corresponding complexity and mystery of character.It's a good story triggering a lot of interesting thoughts about identity, nature vs. nurture, fatherhood and motherhood and brotherhood; the characters are pretty rounded and the plot is developed and resolved in satisfying ways. But I was always aware that I was reading a fiction, that all of this had been created and orchestrated for me, that these people would never be completely real.(I read the large print edition because that's what my library had.)