You Remind Me of Me
by Dan Chaon
Ballantine

Dan Chaon's debut novel, "You Remind Me of Me," is about regret. It's about all of the ways we humans screw up the lives we never asked for to begin with, and it's about how we pick up the pieces. Actually, it's not about us — it's about Nora, Jonah, Troy and a handful of others — but it might as well be.

Chaon's a bit like a therapist, a writer-therapist who effectively turns his characters into mirrors, in the process committing readers to one of two choices: take a good hard look inside yourself or bury your demons a little deeper. This is arguably the case with a lot of Chaon's writing, which to date, has consisted primarily of short stories ("Fitting Ends," "Among the Missing"). He's unnervingly perceptive of the human condition, and it's this acute vision that enables him to inject his characters with a true-to-life grit often missing in today's fictional personalities.

"You Remind Me of Me" opens with the melancholic Jonah Doyle, age 6. He lives in Little Bow, Neb. with his grandfather, a tired-of-life man who spouts the occasional halfhearted joke, and his despondent mother Nora, a wisp of a woman who spends long hours lying on her bed behind a closed door, glassed over to the tune of an old 45. Left alone one afternoon, Jonah engages Elizabeth, the family's doberman pinscher, in innocuous child's play that results in a tragic accident, a mauling that nearly kills Jonah.

In fact, it does, momentarily. "He thinks of his own heart, which was stopped when they got to him and then suddenly lurched forward, no one knew why, it just started again right around the time they were preparing to pronounce him deceased."

It's this turn that sets the stage for Chaon's entry into a strenuous, meandering tale of fate and circumstance. Stylistically, the book is a hit; Chaon never misses a beat as he slides in and out of his characters' lives, favoring a deliberate back-forward-back approach over a simple chronological telling of events.

The scene eventually shifts to St. Bonaventure, Neb., a colorless plains town flanked by wheat fields and barren hillsides, filled in with a cluster of homes, a few stores, a gas station and a bar. It's a setting, "a town that people passed through on their way to somewhere else," that appears to wrap easily around its inhabitants, but like the movie in which the disassociated Jonah views his life, the aerial view only reveals so much. As in much of his writing, Chaon argues masterfully for the complexity of every one of his characters, leading us to the recognition that to be human is to possess inscrutable depth.

With Jonah as a reference point, we're introduced to Troy Timmens, well-meaning and fiercely loving father to the observant Loomis. Troy, who sells marijuana to a devoted following for the "simple, cheerful camaraderie about it," rues his flagging ambition and a series of poor choices that led him away from a more intellectual existence, instead veering into a life of bartending and gaming marathons.

Lives start crisscrossing, connections unravel, resentment is exposed. "I just wanted to change places with you, that's what I really wanted, if you want to know the truth. Because if I had your life — If I had your life, I wouldn't have fucked it up as bad as you did. I would have done better, you know?"

If-I-had-your-life streams through the book, as characters imagine themselves outside of their ill-fated skin, outside of their ill-fated histories, leading lives glossy and significant. The role of choice is considered, too: the notion that maybe, through willful action, their lives could have looked otherwise. In "You Remind Me of Me," as in real life, reaction to these ideas fluctuates; whatever your ideology, the clock keeps ticking.

E-mail Kristen Elde at kje7@u.washington.edu.