"Await Your Reply"

Await Your Reply--the first novel I read on a Kindle (which might be interesting to remember as the years go on and reading changes forever)--is a story of false identity. The book seemed to have no setting, and I'm not sure if that was a byproduct of distraction from reading on a new device, or if Dan Chaon's writing style simply focused the reader on the masked facades that each character created. Either way, it's a fine "Internet Generation" story:

An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity. Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases. Which isn’t necessarily you, of course. You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself.

You wake up and feel fairly happy, happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, moving into the empty hours that probably won’t be anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignition and driving down streets that are so familiar you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops, though, yes, you are still present, your mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway even though there is no memory at all of these actions. Perhaps if you were hypnotized such mundane moments could be retrieved, they are written on some file and stored, unused and useless in some neurological clerk’s back room. Does it matter? You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole.