Communication BREAKDOWN

DAN CHAON’S ILL WILL SHOWS A MAN BEING SHATTERED IN LIFE AND ON THE PAGE

Dustin Tillman, the main character in Dan Chaon’s powerful new novel Ill Will, seems to have the sort of life that can be summed up in a few tight phrases. He is, Chaon writes, “forty-one years old, married with two teenage sons, a psychologist with a small practice and formerly, he sometimes told people, some occasional forays into forensics.” His tidy life, however, is not quite as simple as it seems. And it is about to take a sharp turn into the darkness.

One thing Tillman doesn’t usually talk about – his college-age sons don’t even know – is that his parents were murdered, along with his aunt and uncle, when Tillman was just a boy. His testimony was crucial in the conviction of his adopted brother Russell for the crimes, an account steeped in heavy metal music, drug use, abuse and, as became disturbingly de rigueur in the early 1980s, satanic ritual. Now, as Tillman is informed by his cousin Kate, who was also present at the time of the murders, Russell has been released — exonerated by DNA evidence and the hard work of the Innocence Project.

It’s not just that, though. The day he learns of his brother’s release, Tillman’s wife reveals a critical diagnosis: she is dying of cancer.

And on the work front, one of his patients – Aqil, a Cleveland Police officer on medical leave – describes a series of mysterious deaths, university-age men who disappear after nights of drinking, only to be found drowned days or weeks later. While the deaths have been filed as accidental, an online mythology has sprung up positing that a serial killer is at work. Aqil refers to the suspect as the Jack Daniels Killer.

Tillman is, naturally enough, left reeling by all this, and the reader reels along with him. But with enough material for several straightforward genre novels, Chaon takes a different tack entirely, gradually flaying away the levels of Tillman’s carefully constructed life, revealing not just lies and halftruths but a complete blurring of reality and a history steeped in blood and pain, pulsing into the present.

Chaon shifts effortlessly between timelines and between characters, each movement unsettlingly intimate and immediate, each adding to the steadily expanding sense of dread and uncertainty; each shift chipping away at Tillman. When, for example, Russell contacts Tillman’s youngest son Aaron, we’re drawn into the boy’s perspective and into the slow shattering of his own world, with the death of his mother, the loss of his best friend and his descent into heroin addiction. His father, meanwhile, remains blithely unaware of the depths of the boy’s trauma. Similarly, the night of the murders – and the ensuing trial at which Tillman testified – is examined from several perspectives, revealing incrementally what happened. Or so it seems.

The Tillman who emerges is given to slips from reality and a heightened sense of gullibility, but this revelation occurs early in the reader’s journey, a touchstone in an immersion into a world of death and degradation, of loss and disintegration. This disintegration is mirrored by the text itself. While gaps within paragraphs and missing punctuation (especially within dialogue) seem, at first, to be an affectation (or a proof-reader’s nightmare) their significance is eventually revealed, and what was initially irksome becomes a powerful element in the novel’s almost primal force. Like the characters in Tillman’s life, we have been drawn in by his seeming normalcy, by his placid facade, overlooking the skips and gaps in order to preserve the image in our minds, until it is too late.

Similarly, there are passages where the text is broken into columns, a jarring recalibration of the reading experience requiring the reader to navigate between timelines in a new way, participating in the splintering of a personality, events folding and refracting between levels of awareness and understanding.

Were Ill Will only a skilled dismembering of a man’s self-image in pursuit of deeper truths, it would be impressive enough, but there’s so much more going on. To Chaon’s credit, Ill Will actually contains answers to its central mysteries – the death of Tillman’s family and the contemporary deaths – as well as resolutions to its central conflicts and questions – including Tillman’s relationships with Russell and Aaron – but these answers and resolutions are ultimately as unsettling as the mysteries and questions themselves.

Ill Will serves as a vivid reminder of the sheer power of story, the force by which we shape our lives, and which can also tear them down.

WE HAVE BEEN DRAWN IN BY HIS SEEMING NORMALCY, BY HIS PLACID FACADE, UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE