Sleepwalk

Will Bear, now fifty, has used so many names that he jokes about calling himself the Barely Blur. For more than half his life he has lived off the grid, with no real job, no tax returns, and no lasting partner. He works as a cheerful hired hand for a powerful, ruthless organization whose workings he has deliberately never tried to understand. He drifts between states in the camper van he loves, taking jobs that are sometimes questionable and often dangerous. He also microdoses LSD and carries a tangled, lonely past.

His closest attachments are an aging rescue dog who suffers from post-traumatic stress and a childhood friend just as embedded in the underworld, a friend Will is growing less certain he can trust. Then a call comes in on one of his disposable phones from a twenty-year-old woman who says she is his biological daughter, the result of a sperm donation he made long ago. Will suspects she may be artificial intelligence. She needs his help. She has become caught up in a sprawling scheme tied to his employers, and each contact with her makes it harder to tell the people he works for from the people he is running from.

The story is fast, darkly comic, and suspenseful, set in a near-future America. Chaon combines close attention to emotional detail with brisk, plot-driven intrigue, and his characters feel recognizably real. The novel looks back at where the country has been and ahead to where it may be going, and it considers the enduring troubles and pleasures of being human, which persist no matter how far a person travels to escape them or how carefully they hide.