Dan Chaon's newest book is set in a near future dystopian America. Will Bear lives entirely off the grid, criss-crossing the country in his RV doing odd jobs for the crime conglomerate he works for. His only friend and companion is his beloved dog.

Because he believes himself to be entirely "invisible" he is surprised one day to receive a phone call from a woman named Cammie claiming to be his daughter. He wants to find out is she really is his daughter, and also, how she found him.

I'm a Dan Chaon fan, and the book interested me, and kept me reading. While often the events described are surreal, the characters are very real. I also enjoyed the depiction of a future America that is horrific, and yet entirely plausible and believable. I didn't always fully understand what was going on, but I enjoyed the ride.

3 stars ( )

This is a road-trip of discovery, set in an near-future America, focused on a man who has lived a driftless life, running errands and cleaning up messes for a largely faceless criminal organization, but who is gradually coming to the realization that his life can be so much more, if only he can muddle his way through.

This quote neatly sums up the cultural context of the novel, not far off from our own times: "These days, nearly everyone you meet has patched together a different version of reality, depending on which news sources and websites and YouTube influencers they decided to trust. And so my policy is just to listen with an open ear, hoping there might be some small kernel of truth at the core of what they've come to believe. We're all trying our best to make sense of things. We'd all prefer if the world would just be reasonable and logical, but it refuses. And so even the normally intelligent espouse all kinds of unbelievable notions. After the newspapers started dying, a lot of the things we thought were accepted facts and shared truths, those started dying as well. And even the fundamentals of science and mathematics, even events that have been corroborated by dozens of witnesses were open to question."

The heart of the story is the narrator's emotional journey, but it was the glimpses of dystopian America that seem to resonate most with me. The writing is smooth and clear, not flashy, but still evocative in many places. Highly recommended.
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Sleepwalk is an oddball, dark, but absolutely appealing tale of bad guys, almost–good guys (the exception being a thoroughly excellent dog), and the sheer work necessary to confront fate when it comes your way. The protagonist, a career mercenary who lives well outside the boundaries of society, never quite has an official name; he calls himself the Barely Blur, a nod to his shifting identities, but averages out along the way to Will—the principle of self-determination being something he grapples with throughout the novel. He’s deeply damaged, and does some terrible things, but he’s the kind of character Chaon writes so well: amiable, a bit befuddled, thoughtful right up to the point where his introspection can take him no further. Will is jogged out of his track as a cog in a dark network when a woman claiming to be his daughter—the result of a series of sperm donations he made for the money as a young man—manages to track him down (wonderful image of a bucket of burner phones suddenly, and horrifyingly to Will, all vibrating).

There ensues a bit of a road movie, bit of a shaggy dog tale, bit of a musing on the limits and uses of paranoia in a vaguely dystopic near future (which is not all that far removed from the present day, honestly—lots of surveillance and shadow societies in the mix). But Will is also one of those characters that Chaon writes so well, introspective and slightly bemused, damaged but with a solid core of decency. I don’t know what you’d exactly call this—sympathetic noir?—but I liked it a lot. ( )

I loved this book for its compelling strangeness. Most of the plot points in this book are not at all appealing to me but I couldn't turn away. I had no idea where it was headed and even after it veered into dystopian territory and killer robots began to appear, I kept going. Chaon is a fabulous storyteller. ( )

This is a road-trip novel set in a near-future (or possibly alternate) America in which society is slowly collapsing but you can still find people willing to pick up a hitchhiker or break your nose for a hundred bucks. Billy travels across America in his RV, the Guiding Star, with his strangely endearing dog, Flip, rescued from a dog-fighting outfit. Billy does odd jobs of a criminal nature for a vague corporate entity, who make use of the fact that in a world where everything about everybody is in the cloud somewhere, Billy technically doesn't exist and is thus invisible. However, he did donate sperm back in the day, which was used to make babies, one of which calls him on his untraceable burner phone and starts the whole convoluted plot rolling. The story is part long-distance chase, part mystery, part techno thriller, part bizarro dystopia, and we bumble through it with affable Billy, as he remembers scenes from his dysfunctional childhood, gradually comes to question everything he just accepted in the past, and starts losing/shedding vital parts of his previous life. While this novel paints a grim picture of the world that's waiting for us just around the corner, it does so with dark humor and a sense of grim optimism. ( )