George has spirited Lucy off to Nebraska, to the musty motel with a lighthouse motif that he describes as his mother’s home. George also says that the place was once situated lakeside, but all Lucy can see is dust where the lake used to be. There is a body of water in evidence, but it’s on the television set that conveniently plays Rebecca, with Mrs Danvers’ sinister sweet talk about the sea, in a handy Hitchcock-Du Maurier reference. No wonder Lucy’s a little nervous.
Then there’s the Arctic piece of this puzzle: Miles’ search for the lost Hayden, his troubled and alarming twin brother. When Hayden began to refer to “a hodgepodge of crypto-archaeology and numerology, holomorphy and brane cosmology, past-life regression and conspiracy-theory paranoia” as “my work,” Miles realized that he needed to be his brother’s keeper. But Hayden, who is even sneaker than the book’s other secretive characters, which is saying quite a lot, would much rather bait Miles than let Miles find him.
Chaon takes his sweet time — and if you’re lucky, he’ll take some of yours — in aligning the elements of his story so that clarity can begin to emerge. Like Kate Atkinson, who is not officially referenced here but might as well be, he’s particularly good at scrambling timelines in ways that conceal the truth, and in creating quick, occasional deja vu moments that show readers how certain events are connected.
So Chaon succeeds in both creating suspense and making it pay off, but Await Your Reply also does something even better. Like the finest of his storytelling heroes, Chaon manages to bridge the gap between literary and pulp fiction with a clever, insinuating book equally satisfying to fans of either genre. He does travel two roads, even though that guy David Frost said it wasn’t possible.
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