Await your reply

Written by Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply is a novel that tries to raise questions about identity but keeps forgetting to develop them, deciding instead to focus its attention on a boring group of static, shallow characters.

The story is told through the eyes of three main characters: we follow Lucy, a student who ran away with her history professor, George, with the promise of getting rich; we have the young Ray, who discovers he is adopted and, after running away from home, finds his biological father and enters the world of crime; and finally, we come to the bitter Miles, who is searching for his twin brother, Hayden, and has finally acquired news regarding his whereabouts.

Lucy’s point of view is the most tiresome of the three. She’s supposed to be very intelligent and hard-working, as we learn that she didn’t go to renowned universities such as Harvard just because the world is an unfair place that doesn’t reward competent people. Even though this last bit is quite true, there’s still an enormous mismatch between how Lucy is described and how she actually acts in the book. Her wisdom, for example, is already called into question when we learn that she has abandoned her whole life for a man she barely knows, which is always a very dangerous idea, but Lucy then makes it worse by revealing that she cares much more about the professor’s money than his personality: she ran away with George to be rich, not because she liked him. And here’s the icing on the cake: she believes George is being truthful about his supposed fortune just because of his dignified poise, robust vocabulary, and expensive car. I bet you’re judging Lucy right now, too. Welcome to the club.

And honestly, who can blame us? Lucy is incredibly passive – she expects George to do everything for her, from cooking, driving, and buying groceries to even making plans about their future –, she’s got a needy and paranoid personality – when she wakes up one day and doesn’t find George at her side, she feels betrayed and abandoned –; and lots of futile worries, too – during what should be the book’s climax she is… buying shoes. Lucy, nonetheless, still makes long observations of what’s happening around her, which can try the patience of even the most Benedictine of monks. Maybe Harvard is better without her, just saying.

Ray’s plot, however, is not much better. The young man’s backstory bears many similarities to Lucy’s, sharing several thematic connections, too: they both left their previous lives behind, feel lost in the world, are relatively recent orphans, and face problems of identity – questioning their own and of those around them.

Ray’s stay with his biological father is one of constant learning and tension, as the guy is a criminal who uses false identities to perpetrate scams. This means a financially fulfilled but stressful life, which requires them to be always on alert, fearing that one day they’re going to be discovered. The narrative isn’t too much interest in the technical details of their the scams, however, never going into the nitty-gritty of the process of forging documents: the focus lies in the philosophical aspect behind the situation and that aspect alone, raising questions such as “Does the constant exchange of identities dilute an individual’s original personality,” or “when you love a person pretending to be someone else are you loving a lie,” or even more importantly, “Am I going to add this lovely website to favorites or bookmarks and check it out occasionally?”(The right answers are, in order, “No”, “Yes”, and “Of course!”)

Await Your Reply’s main problem lies in the fact that these questions are discarded as soon as they are raised, since the characters don’t really care about them: Lucy, for example, doesn’t love George; her real concern is whether or not he’s got access to the fortune he claims to have. That is, if the professor turns out to be not who he says he is, the revelation will only be an inconvenience for Lucy, as long as his wealth isn’t a lie, too. Ray, in turn, is too practical to worry about general philosophy; he just wants to be competent in his father’s craft.

A striking example of the book’s main problem lies near the end, when Ray reflects on whether it would be cruel of him to return to his adoptive parents’ home years after his disappearance, as they could have already moved on from their loss. The boy raises the question, but doesn’t take it further, merely contemplating asking the opinion of a random man about it. In other words, the novel never opens a real debate around the questions it keeps raising, let alone offers any answer to them, which makes the book’s title ironic… in a sad way.

Miles’ plotline is the better of the bunch, since, although still anticlimactic, it at least throws additional light on the other characters: his journey shows how people don’t live in a vacuum and that those close to us are always affected by our choices – for better or for worse.

The suspense over what happened with Hayden also generates some twists and turns, which, although honestly foreshadowed, are a little more predictable than they should be. The reason lies in the character’s personality, which, being too eccentric, has some quite striking idiosyncrasies. So, after Miles exposes them right at the beginning, it becomes difficult for us not to catch them whenever the character appears hidden behind a false identity. However, a much more serious problem than predictability is the lack of dramatic force in the revelations: the twists here are designed solely to surprise us, without generating consequences to the plot or the characters.

Finally, the book’s structure also sabotages any tension that the narrative may eventually build by including several moments of pure padding. Even worse than Lucy’s irrelevant trip to a hairdresser near the climax, for example, is an early chapter that has a character reading an entire e-mail from their spam folder.

So, the only thing I can say is that there are few good reasons to watch spam being read, and Await Your Reply, unfortunately, isn’t one of them.

September 23, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on February 03, 2018.