Book Report: Ill Will

14. Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017) (7/23/22)

My sister-in-law recommended this book—which actually surprises me, because it doesn't seem like her type of writing. But she likes to listen to books when she's doing chores, and a thriller is as good as anything, I suppose. Anyway, that's why I picked it up. It took me a long time to finish: the structure, which jumps back and forth in time and from narrator to narrator (sometimes on a single, multi-column page), was disorienting, and I didn't much care about the characters. But after recently starting and then (metaphorically) throwing against the wall an unreliable-narrator novel (Lisa Lutz's The Passenger: those characters I really didn't care about), I figured I should keep going and finish a book, for a change. 

This one begins ca. 2012 in northern Ohio with a psychologist and a former cop—a patient, sort of—discussing some recent deaths of college students: was there a serial killer in the area? It is soon revealed that the psychologist, Dustin, lost his parents in a multiple murder when he was a teenager, and his testimony helped send his adoptive brother, Rusty, to prison for thirty years. Also, Rusty has recently been released. We then go back in time to the fall of 1978 and watch Dusty and the six-years-older Rusty interact. Rusty has had a hard childhood, and he's not very nice. The narration switches to 2013 and from Dustin to his younger son, Aaron—a sort of Rashomon effect, only each of the characters is wrapped up in their own world: they aren't really telling the same story, but parallel, somewhat overlapping ones. Then back to June 1983, just before the multiple murder. Then 2012 and Dustin, narrating his and the cop's "investigation" into the college students' deaths. Then fall of 1983, after the murders—exploring another character, Dustin's cousin Kate (who also lost her parents in the murders). Then January 2014 and Aaron again. The next few sections remain in January 2014 (blessedly), and are told from various points of view. The book ends in April. 

Nothing is actually resolved, although one has a pretty good sense of what happened or may have happened—both back in 1983 and in the present day. Part of the point of the story, if there is one, seems to be that "truth" is always illusory, incomplete. The saying of Lao-Tzu comes up a couple of times, "The Tao that we speak of isn't the true Tao." At one point, another cousin, Wave, has a thought:

Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall through a keyhole. . . . Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?

Or as the book's epigraph by Jean de La Fontaine puts it, "We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it." 

If nothing else, these ideas could be considered the "story" of this book, perhaps. In the end, I think I'm just not a fan of Dan Chaon. This is the second book of his that I've read, the first being Await Your Reply—about which I remember not a thing, except that it was clever. Too clever. This one, similarly. I do enjoy a smart book, but when the author is too distracting with his cleverness and experimentation, he's got to make me care more about the characters or the story. It's a matter of taste, in the end.