Imagine Me Gone

"I had the sense," Celia, the only daughter in the troubled family in Imagine Me Gone, thinks on seeing an unnamed painted portrait in a museum, "that this person had been alive." That is the sense you get too from Haslett's characters, especially from Michael, the most troubled and the most articulate among them. Many characters in fiction carry a spark of life, but only when you come across a vivid creation like Michael—his actions both surprising and inevitable, his choices terrible and understandable—do you realize what a rare gift Haslett has. Laura has been telling me how good this book is for months; I finally caught up with it, and I agree.