Review: Sleepwalk

Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Utter, inspired lunacy.

I didn’t intend to buy this book. I was looking for something else on the shelf, and – when I saw Dan Chaon’s name – I recognized it as someone I’d been meaning to check out at some indefinite time down the road. I picked it up, loved the sound of the back of the book, and put it to the test: if I like the first paragraph, I’d consider buying it.

When I didn’t look up until I’d finished page 5, I knew I was in. I did get other things at the store, but I kept reading this past the cash register and even as I walked out the door. It’s that arresting at the start.

And it’s that wonderfully weird throughout.

“Billy” – he goes by multiple names – is a blue-collar, black-ops “wet work” specialist for an array of evil corporations, organized crime cartels, and bizarre think tanks. Sometimes he arrests people who’ve pissed off his employers. Sometimes he ferries newborns in black-market adoptions. And sometimes he kills people.

He lives in a near-time dystopian future when much of America’s infrastructure has collapsed. One subtle and running joke, though, is that it doesn’t sound all that different from the traffic, pot-marked roads, drones, and surveillance cameras that we already endure.

Then, mysteriously, he gets a call from a girl who says she believes he’s her father.

In lesser hands, I don’t think this would work. For two-thirds of the novel, Billy is on the move (that’s not a spoiler since he lives his life that way from word one) and slowly recalling a childhood he’s mostly repressed.

It’s the perpetual weirdness that carries the freight here.

Billy has a special recipe for microdosing LSD, dissolving tablets in single-shot bottles of whiskey and then eye-dropping bits every so often. He listens to tame oldies while he kidnaps fugitives for his employers. He meets a drug connection who gets off on sucking his toes. He has a loyal dog, one he rescued from a dog-fighting ring and who hates almost everyone else. He carries on conversations with drones. He may or may not have killed his own mother, but he gets caught up in thinking of himself as a father…after a long-ago sperm donation.

In other words, you never know what will happen next. I probably made it the occasional 4-5 pages without snorting in laughter, but that was a rare dry patch. Chaon gives us a bizarre and hilarious world and world-view.

At the same time, there are real questions at play. Above all, in a comic rather than noir fashion, it asks the question of what we owe people when we are no longer bound by conventional morality.

The focus of that question is whether Billy will answer the implicit distress of his potential daughter or whether he will be loyal to the code of his operations – a code that has seen him survive but at the price of virtually every relationship he’s ever known.

This one reminds me of Jonathan Lethem at his best and, from me, that’s high praise. Lots of fun, and now I intend to look for more of Choan’s work.


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