I don't like this short story's portrayal of mental illness and how apparently people afflicted with mental illness secretly want to just kill themselves and or shot to be put out of their misery. I wouldn't usually do a spoiler review, but this is a legitimately harmful narrative to put out there. I suffered from severe depression and had to see not only a therapist but a psychiatrist in order to be treated. I had a little voice that got louder and told me that I was nothing and no one would miss me if I were gone. I am happy to be here and wasn't secretly hoping for an organization to come along and murder me. And I don't think that the best things in my life have already occurred so screw living now. 

 

So, "The Remedy" follows a young man named Derrick who has heard great things about a new clinic that has opened up. His cousin tells him that it sounds like this place will help him with his chronic pain condition. It costs $20,000. Derrick who has nothing left to lose decides to pay this and meets the other worldly Dr. Lang. In Dr. Lang's eyes Derrick feels seen for the first time. And readers quickly realize that what is going on with Derrick is not physical pain, but something else. And we have Derrick then flashbacking on his past and an older girlfriend and I guess when he gets the surprise of seeing people dead and knowing he's about to get murdered, it's cool cause his best life was before him and now nothing is left but pain. Derrick also gets to see joyous expressions on people's faces so yeah, murder/suicide is the answer. I hated this story with a passion. 

 

So let's go through this. This story had huge plot holes. How the hell does Derrick have $20,000 just sitting around? 

 

Also is no one in Derrick's life (his mom calls a freaking lot) going to notice he's gone? Was Derrick's cousin secretly setting him up to be killed cause who is running around raving about this place if all the clients end up dead? 

Also why are people being murdered and then thrown into a cargo hold? You just shipping dead bodies around for something else Dr. Lang?

 

This was stupid. So very stupid. 

This is a sad story. It is from different point of views of members of a family. The father is mentally ill and cannot shake it off. He tries over his life but he has to be hospitalized several times and his wife and kids are left to make it through plus take care of him. One of the children inherits mental illness. The reader gets to hear what it's like for the person enduring the mental pain and from those who deal with their lives being turned around repeatedly because of their family member. It's no fun for anyone involved. There's lots of love and tough decisions. This story is well-rounded, adding in everyone's regular issues too. It's a great book for those that want to see how hard life is for people in these situations.

This book starts with a bang — dropping you into the middle of the action without any information and then leaving you the balance of the book to put the facts together. Kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not entirely a pleasant feeling, but a compelling device.

 

From the very beginning, most of the characters are in untenable positions, with their lives spinning ever more deeply out of control. This is not the story of a dysfunctional family, but of a family unable to function at all, as father, and later son, face a crippling mental illness. For me, it was difficult because at times I expected some of the characters to make better decisions; but this would have meant making them based on hard facts rather than heart. Obviously, this was not a light read, though there were some lighter moments; Haslett’s writing is lyrical and elegant, and his character’s fierce love of music is conveyed with loving detail. This book was painful at times to read, but it was, nonetheless, a deeply moving story.

Haslett's latest novel is a compact tale of lives that revolve around the indisputable gravity of mental illness. Narrated in turns by the three children and two parents of an Anglo-American family alternately living in a leafy Boston suburb (which resembles the author's home town of Wellesley), a summer camp in Maine, and London and its environs, Imagine Me Gone traces the lives of each member from the parents' first encounter over gin and tonics through the children's young adulthood.

Perhaps the most enduring and emblematic episode is early in the tale. The father John has taken Alec and Celia, the two youngest children, out on a rowboat between the island and mainland. He cuts the outboard and ships the oars and tells his two children to imagine that he is gone. Pretend he is not here. How would they save themselves. They resist playing the game but he settles back in the boat and closes his eyes and refuses to respond to them. Panicking, they attempt to row themselves to safety but quickly lose the oars overboard. Shrieking and crying, they try to rouse John, but he refuses to respond.

The mental illness depicted in the novel has a similar form: it is largely unresponsive to the other characters efforts to cure it, and these efforts soon turn to desperation and singularly bad choices.

The novel is slow to build its momentum; the wounded characters are protective of their core traits and feelings; an exhausted indifference permeates them, none more so than the mentally ill older son, though he is redeemed by a sense of humor about his situation, which he recounts as if it were a military operation. Once it achieves some momentum, the imperatives and motives of all became much more clear and resonant, if perhaps the novel goes on one chapter too long.

This is a domestic novel, not a thriller. Character, not plot or tension, drive it. Haslett has done a remarkable job of using obscure pop music as a kind of sound track to bring us back in time, but it is the timelessness of the loss that mental illness entails that most characterizes this tale.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/691166258