FIRST FICTION

You Remind Me

of Me

Dan Chaon

Ballantine: 358 pp., $24.95

In this impressive intergenerational saga from onetime National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon, the modern American family is barely family at all: Its members are variously orphaned, abandoned or absentee. Children are born out of wedlock or cared for by proxy guardians. Parents -- biological or adoptive -- are batty, self-absorbed, too old to care, suicidal, dead or under house arrest. Grandparents are meddlesome or out of it and probably the source of ongoing woe anyway. And the next generation has only more of the same to look forward to.

“You Remind Me of Me” tells the personal journey of Jonah Doyle who, like his biblical namesake, has been swallowed up by fate. His whale’s belly is the Midwest, that mythic red-state redoubt of “family values.” From Little Bow, S.D., Jonah -- an awkward fellow with an unfortunate penchant for telling lies -- makes his way to Chicago (where he works briefly as a line cook) and then on to St. Bonaventure, Neb., where destiny -- in the form of payment to PeopleSearch -- has propelled him toward his long-lost older half-brother, Troy Timmens, given away by their wayward mother, Nora, at birth.

Nora, we discover, always gravitated toward trouble and depression. Her 1966 stint at Mrs. Glass House -- where unwed mothers “convalesced” and where she carried Troy to term -- left its scars. Those scars are handed down to Jonah, when, at age 6 in 1977, he’s attacked by Nora’s beloved Doberman. Jonah’s face is disfigured for life, a gruesome reminder of parental disregard and ill fortune.

Of course, finding Troy -- a small-time pot dealer and single dad with a son named Loomis -- does little to shore up Jonah’s wobbly sense of himself. Even so, the fraternal bond exerts an unshakeable, if unsatisfying, hold on both men. For Jonah, Troy is a living, breathing and ultimately disappointing version of one of the “people he might have been” -- people brought up by “real” families.

Chaon’s restless narrative zooms back and forth from the 1960s to the 1970s to the 1990s, constantly updating, revisiting and revealing. Each turn of “You Remind Me of Me” adds another layer of flesh -- and mystery -- to Jonah, Troy and their forlorn mother, three archetypal Americans who don’t know each other from Adam but are bound together nevertheless.

*

Father’s Day

Philip Galanes

Alfred A. Knopf: 218 pp., $22.95

In Matthew Vaber, Philip Galanes has created a narrator precariously poised somewhere between hero and antihero. Insecure, self-obsessed, superficial and cranky, Matthew spends every waking hour dialing 555-PUMP, looking for a connection, however fleeting, among a rogues’ gallery of potential sexual or emotional saviors. “I never include genitalia,” he tells us of his conversations, anxious that we don’t get the wrong impression. He’s after a more rarefied kind of tawdry: “Does he like Muriel Spark, for instance; does he play backgammon; does he have a boyfriend already?” When Matthew makes haste to a downtown sex club, it’s no surprise that he spends an inordinate amount of time folding his clothes into neat piles and comparing the claustrophobic buddy booths to the fitting rooms at Bergdorf Goodman.

Matthew is clearly coping with some issues. His exertions on the Pump Line might have something to do with the recent suicide of his father, a shadowy figure recalled in flashbacks: tennis and driving lessons, the agony of Little League. As Matthew zeroes in on Harry, a child psychiatrist dreamboat he meets on his favorite phone line, he plans a memorial with his aloof, imperious mother who, to Matthew’s delight, might actually be a lesbian. The proposed memorial steadily downgrades into a cocktail party, while Matthew scrambles to get a handle on his parents (who were these people?), himself (why do I keep calling this number?) and Harry (is he too perfect for me?).

“Father’s Day” might be more psychologically pat than probing, but line by tart line, Galanes gives us a curious and even brave thing: a novel at once comic and heartbreaking, brutally frank and willfully obscure, in which a guy’s appetite for escapist, anonymous sex just might deliver him toward self-realization.