Dan Chaon’s Madcap Novel About a Road-Tripping Mercenary

SLEEPWALK, by Dan Chaon

“Sleepwalk,” Dan Chaon’s fourth novel, begins with the mercenary Will Bear, a mild-mannered Mad Max in a tricked-out camper van, delivering a debtor named Liandro into the arms of his creditor. The particulars of Liandro’s debt are as imprecise as the long run awaiting him, although to inform by the ankle shackles and the numerous tears shed, Liandro isn’t optimistic. Will does his finest to maintain issues mild, supplying Liandro with hits from a blunt and providing to play board video games with him of their downtime as the 2 head east by means of the Bonneville Salt Flats. However Liandro is in no temper, and his weeping turns intense.

Will received’t have any actual misgivings about his line of labor till his subsequent task, when the trade-off entails much more harmless fare: a 3-week-old child. The top-user is simply too terrifying to ponder and shortly provokes in Will a soothing stream of delusions. Right here he’s justifying his function in human trafficking:

“I like the concept that I’ll cross the little man off to somebody who will promote him to some good rich couple who will increase him as their very own son. I image a film star and her kindly, infertile husband, or some homosexual guys in short-sleeved shirts, hoping to make themselves a household in Minneapolis, and I image them strolling alongside by means of that rose backyard in Lyndale Park with a toddler between them, and so they cross that large fairly fountain with the cherubs on it and so they let him dangle his toes within the water.”

Hmm, I doubt it. However I did adore it. Chaon creates a daring irony within the disconnect between the highway warrior’s self-deceit and the reader’s skepticism. The thriller, the ethical audacity, the sense that something is feasible in these early pages refreshes not solely the hit-man trope but in addition the world itself. Chaon faucets into the prurient thrill of driving shotgun with the unpredictable, and the query dawns: Simply how lawless and unhinged will the world of “Sleepwalk” get?

Like Liandro, Will Bear (certainly one of a number of aliases beneath the rubric he calls the “Barely Blur”) is working off some type of debt, incurred by the deplorable mom he finally murders, as a general-purpose contract killer and cleanup man. This inheritance, like most inheritances in Chaon’s work, hangs over Will with the load of a biblical curse and stunts all hope of private development. However as indebted matricides go, he’s well mannered, intermittently sensible and eminently huggable. He efficiently shrugs off his dangerous recollections with copious quantities of marijuana and the occasional morning beer. If these aren’t your coping mechanisms, effectively, it’s seemingly your mom didn’t incubate you by turkey baster with a view to flip a fast revenue after which demand, “Don’t ever name me Mother.”