If it was not yet ‘The Age of Anxiety’ in 1947, when Auden published his long poem of the same name, now it most certainly is, given the manifold global uncertainties that keep any sane person awake with worry. Nearly 20 per cent of adult Americans have been diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder, while the pharmaceutical industry has produced a legion of drugs that promise to combat the effects of such conditions.
In Adam Haslett’s beautiful new novel, Imagine Me Gone, mental illness rips through one New England family over the course of four decades. Told in alternating first-person chapters by the parents and their three children, it is a captivating portrait of the ways depression and anxiety mark both the afflicted and everyone who loves them.
Margaret, mother and sometime librarian, is anxious about the instability of life with her British husband, John, a downwardly mobile venture capitalist who is profoundly depressed, beset by ‘the beast’ within him.
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