IMAGINE ME GONE by Adam Haslet Nominated for Putlizer Prize and Nat'l Bk Award '17

"Imagine Me Gone" was short listed for both the Putlizer and Nat'l Book Award ('17).  An award for masochism is bestowed to whomever completes Adam Haslet's sorrowful novel.  It's about a family  contending with multi-generational mental illness & suicide.  Haslet's writing is suffocating.  It creates a fugue state of overwhelmingly depression.  The novel begins with a death that foreshadows an ominous veil of darkness.  It shifts back to a light young romance between Margaret, a young American woman and John, a charming British gentleman in London in 1960.   The two become engaged and Margaret returns to the states to plan their wedding only to be called back to tend to her hospitalized fiancee.  What Margaret didn't or couldn't comprehend is what John's on-going mental illness & how it impact their lives.  Writer William Styron ("Sophie's Choice") wrote about his battles with depression in his memoir "Darkness Visible."  Both Styron and Haslet are brilliant writers.  "Imagine Me Gone" attempts to capture what Styron expressed in his memoir by letting the reader into a world of darkness that is unfathomable but for those who suffer from debilitating depression.  Styron wrote, "No light, but rather darkness visible."  Margaret and John get married & move to the states where they raise their children, Michael, Celia and Alec.  The story has the narrative of all 5 family members.  John's depression, the "beast" returns if it ever went away only to project everything he is incapable of doing or feeling and from which there is no getting better.  John takes his young children, Celia & Alec out in a boat.  He tells them to imagine him gone, it's just the two of them and imagine him gone.  He asks them now what do you do?  Stuck out in the boat they lose one oar & find themselves helpless & adrift.  Michael the eldest has his own madness.  Margaret, Celia & Alec struggle to contend with a beloved sibling which is a demanding & futile undertaking.  Haslet's penetrating writing carves some understanding of mental suffering.  "What do you fear when you fear everything?  Time passing and not passing.  Death and life.  I {Michael} could say my lungs never filled with enough air."  Clearly, the pain it exacts on loved ones is behemoth,  although no one's capacity is infinite.  Michael is also consumed with gaining restitution for slavery and issues of social injustice.  The only relief Michael finds came from music.  Haslet's potent writing snares the reader in  crushing tentacles of agony.  Had I imagined how grueling & how far the suffering in "Imagine me Gone" would go, I would not have commenced this forlorn sojourn.  "I had never before understood the invisibility of a human...a spirit we can never see."