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Chris Eaton, a Biography: a novel
Haven't we all been driven, at some point, to Google ourselves? And what did you find? That there are people out there who seem to have something in common with you? Dates, places, interests? How coincidental are these connections? And what are the factors that define a human life? We are the sum of our Anecdotal constructs. We remember moments in our pasts the way we remember television episodes. In pieces. And we realize that our own memories are no more valid in the construction of our identities than stories we've heard from others. Chris A Biography constructs a life by using, as building blocks, the lives of dozens of other people who share nothing more than a name, identities that blur into each other with the idea that, in the end, we all live the same life, deal with the same hopes and fears, experience the same joys and tragedies. Only the specifics are different. From birth to death and everything in between, the narratives we share bring us closer to a truth about what it means to be alive. To be you.
- GenresFiction
300 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2013
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46 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 11, 2013
This is more three and a half stars.
The inventiveness and the conceit are appreciated. Chris Eaton, a real person, a writer from new brunswick, has compiled and merged the stories of various Chris Eatons, male and female, into an amusing exploration of identity. There are, along the way, other people who share other similar names, and some of those names haunt the other characters (usually, they haunt a Chris Eaton). The histories and professions given to characters are amusing, skewed, and not to be trusted. Exactly what we expect from fiction. _Chris Eaton, a Biography_ is an amusing and, at times, smartly demented excursion into 'what if' thinking any of us might do when we come across, in this Googling age, those who bear our names (or whose names we bear).
The inventiveness and the conceit are appreciated. Chris Eaton, a real person, a writer from new brunswick, has compiled and merged the stories of various Chris Eatons, male and female, into an amusing exploration of identity. There are, along the way, other people who share other similar names, and some of those names haunt the other characters (usually, they haunt a Chris Eaton). The histories and professions given to characters are amusing, skewed, and not to be trusted. Exactly what we expect from fiction. _Chris Eaton, a Biography_ is an amusing and, at times, smartly demented excursion into 'what if' thinking any of us might do when we come across, in this Googling age, those who bear our names (or whose names we bear).
November 25, 2025
This multi-biography of numerous Chris Eatons is full of interesting plot and actual events. On and on, it has enough plot for 10 books, because in a way it is. Lots of fun
June 14, 2016
I wrote a detailed review of this book a while back for a site that appears to no longer exist. So I'm reposting below:
The novel Chris Eaton: A Biography sets out not to tell the story of one individual named Chris Eaton, but rather to explore the totality of Chris Eatons in the world, to detail the lives of more than a dozen different people whose only shared trait is their name. I say “more than a dozen” because it is difficult—and one suspects the ambiguity is intentional—to track which Chris Eaton is being discussed at any given point in the narrative. Is it the book’s author himself? Is it the influential 70s musician? The young man who once had a tryst with Motörhead drumer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor? The 9/11 survivor turned conspiracy theorist? The woman in the failing marriage? And is that woman the same as the musician? Sometimes there are clear markers of exactly who the reader is following, but more often the book checks in on the present lives of these people unmoored from any particular past or future.
Midway through the book, author Chris Eaton writes that life is “the sum of a series of unrelated stories,” a line that stands as a clear mission statement for this project. Eaton is attempting to reimagine the novel for a world in which the notion of personal identity is more slippery and difficult to pin down than ever before, thanks to the fracturing effects of social media and metadata paradoxically diluting our collective sense of self. It’s easy to imagine the author, bored one evening and plugging his name into Google to see what happens, discovering a whole world of other Chris Eatons who are responsible for an array of activities both remarkable and mundane. It’s easy to imagine the author then reconsidering his own existence in relation to these people with his name, wondering where he begins and where they end, if there is any connection between them or if it’s all just coincidence. We have all done this, even if some of us are embarrassed to admit it. According to the internet, I am a writer, but I am also a bagpiper (see: “Who’s Who in Bagpiping?”), a sad-eyed COO of a software company, a Global Competency Manager at an oil company, a different kind of writer, a stock broker, an investment manager, another stock broker, a boxer, still another stock broker, and a fictional sheriff on the TV show The Mentalist. There are hundreds of confirmed cases of Tom McAllister in the world – all of them, as far as I can tell, are white males, many of them seem to have jobs that require wearing collared shirts and ties, roughly half of them are overweight, and we live in at least thirty-seven different US states. Each of these men represents a different permutation on a theme, one of the infinite possibilities for the life of a given Tom McAllister, a concept that is somewhat comforting in the we are not alone sense but also confounding and maybe a little hopeless when followed to its logical endpoint, especially since any effort to develop a coherent narrative of the collective is bound to result in loose ends and strained connections.
After detailing the story of a young boy who claims to be a time traveler stuck in the body of a child, Eaton writes:
“But that, of course, is just one possibility among infinite, and these millions and billions and kajillions of singularities are all operating simultaneously, starting over and over and over, opening themselves up to countless repeated lives, always room for one more, out of sequence, taking you back three days, then three years, then thirty, then a minute, then a million, as if filling in the gaps, like defragging a computer, or the memory of a dying man, until all the pieces make a life, and even if the life you’re currently living is horrible beyond belief, none of it really matters because eventually your life is gone as you know it.”
The book is bursting with passages like this, contemplating the metaphorical meanings of these many overlapping lives, the metaphysical strain of trying to comprehend them all, weighing the endless potential represented by our lives at the start versus the sense that the choices we make may not matter in the end. Some of these passages, like the one above, are energetic and insightful and compelling, but after a while the book becomes soggy with philosophical exposition. By the midpoint of the novel, there have been fourteen such passages, ranging in length from a single paragraph to a few pages; each is interesting on its own, but they become repetitive as they accumulate, not building off of one another but rather giving the sense of narrative wheel-spinning. The book insists upon reiterating its purpose so often that after 200 pages, you still feel like you’re just getting started. Another example:
“Something happens, we tell someone else, we obfuscate, the story changes, it becomes the new truth.
We create our own identities.
By telling stories.”
And another:
“In fact, perhaps our imaginations are just a link to a collective unconscious, so that the thoughts we happen to stumble across while holding the hand of a dying lover, or staggering from the cafeteria to the bathroom, or tossing spoiled food into the furnace room because there’s nowhere else for it to go and throwing it outside just attracts more wild animals and looters, are really just pinhole exposures into actual events somewhere else on the planet.”
I reject the phrase “novel of ideas” on principle because all novels have ideas in them, even bad novels filled with bad ideas. But: this book is very much focused on the philosophical, less so on plot and character development and the sort of things one often expects from contemporary North American fiction. It is an investigation into our sense of the self and how we determine not only who we will be but how we even know who we are to begin with. Many of the individual protagonists are interesting enough people, but some of them aren’t rendered with much complexity, due to the demands of the novel to keep moving further and further away from them in pursuit of grander ideas. The intellectual goals of the book erect barriers between the reader and the people who are the ostensible subjects of the book. So, rather than investigating the totality of these people, what the novel sometimes does is present a relatively flat portrayal of someone who is noteworthy only because of his or her name, and then moves on to another person tangentially related to that person. It is easy to get lost amid the names and half-finished plot arcs, especially because within the stories of the individual Eatons, the free-floating narrator is prone to layers of convoluted digression.
Just one example of the digressive voice that dominates the narrative: advice columnist Chris Eaton receives a letter about an adult film star named Ian Dowd. Eaton once worked with Ian Dowd, pre-porn (this association was plotted early in the book, but after confronting so many names that never returned, I confess that I’d forgotten this detail). He becomes obsessed with tracking down information on his former acquaintance. This quest leads to many online searches, which narrow his list down to a number of people who have used this stage name, and then he finds himself interested in an actor who worked with Ian Dowd, so we get a full page sketch of that actor. Following that trail leads him to an academic study on pornography, which is explained in some detail, and then eventually to a porn star named Tina Cerosz, whose life story is described over the course of several pages, including further digressions into the story of her father and also her grandfather, who was involved in the Polish resistance. Eaton never finds the information he’s looking for. The section ends and is not referenced again.
Is it possible for a reader to care about all of these people? It is not possible. There are limits to the extent of our compassion and empathy. Eventually, each person just becomes another name added to the pile. From one section to the next, there is little variety in tone, pace, voice, or diction; there is just a relentless march of new person after new person.
Presumably, Chris Eaton is aware of limits of human empathy, and is aware that his readers will not finish this book having intimately known or cared about or even remembered every character. These digressions, then, serve as explorations of the limits of our capacity to care, and also illustrations of the endless, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconish web of associations that have formed between us and all the people in our lives. It’s an extremely ambitious idea to try to illustrate this phenomenon within a novel. But I suggest this is a case where the ambition outstrips the execution.
The book is committed to excess—when a character takes on a task, he or she does so in a fanatical manner, as in the valet parking attendant who becomes obsessed with the idea of maximizing the space efficiency of his lot and spends all night arranging and rearranging the cars until he discovers the ideal layout. Characters’ interests are often detailed in a series of what the book itself calls “prosaic and wearisome lists,” many of which seem inessential to the book. This commitment to excess is the novel’s ultimate undoing, as there is no clear principle of selection at work. Some of the best bits in here—a list of ideas for movie sequels (“The Ramboer War – Rambo travels through time to fight in South Africa and makes sure apartheid never happened”), a Cowboys and Indians-themed birthday party supervised by a mother who made the children sign treaties with one another, the anecdote of a man trying to cover his body with tattoos of every country in the world but giving up when he couldn’t keep up with all the political turmoil in Eastern Europe—are funny and inventive and smart, but each of these individual moments don’t seem to add up to something greater. And there are an equal number of examples of unsatisfying detours into, for example, a painstakingly detailed description of the minutiae of gameplay issues in 80s video games, or the ideal chemical makeup of fertile soil.
By the final chapter, the various Chris Eatons are aging and facing their own mortality, coping with regrets of lives gone wrong, or at least gone not-entirely-right. One character is convinced “he’d made all the wrong choices in life.” Many are professionally unfulfilled and realize they’ve failed to live up to the limitless potential promised in the early going. Others are sick or have watched loved ones die. They, and the novel, are now in a reflective mode:
“When we grow older, we become more sentimental, more challenged by artistic depictions of death, depravity, travesty, tragedy, horror, sadness. As children, death is something we don’t even understand, something we watch like a ceiling fan then forget, something we long to put in our mouths. As adolescents, we are trained to be more cynical. Awkwardness teaches us to laugh at these things. But as we grow older, we become more affected, by these films, these stories, because our experience has shown them to be true. All of them. Each horrible event in our lives makes us realize that anything is possible.
Probable.
Has actually happened.
Is actually happening.”
This is one of the strongest passages in the book, one of those moments when everything comes together and the voice and content match, when the metaphors and philosophical musings have real weight due to an accumulation of actual life events behind them, and the wistful tone serves the narrative perfectly. But dropped amid even more digressive pages filled with inconsequential characters, it serves to highlight my primary frustration with this book—there isn’t a strong enough editorial instinct on display, so that its effort to share everything sometimes inhibits its ability to connect with a reader who wants to know that the things they’re reading matter and are there for a reason.
Because Chris Eaton: A Biography is determined to break free of the form of the traditional novel, it’s not fair to criticize it for not adhering to the tropes of traditional novels. But it is fair to say that it never fully delivers on the promise of an ambitious and inventive conceit. In a way, the novel models the fractured way one lives in the world today, through its lack of focus, its information overload, its occasional profundity springing from mundane moments. But perhaps it also stands as an unintentional rebuke to living the way we do, trying so hard to consume every morsel of information while actually consuming nothing at all.
The novel Chris Eaton: A Biography sets out not to tell the story of one individual named Chris Eaton, but rather to explore the totality of Chris Eatons in the world, to detail the lives of more than a dozen different people whose only shared trait is their name. I say “more than a dozen” because it is difficult—and one suspects the ambiguity is intentional—to track which Chris Eaton is being discussed at any given point in the narrative. Is it the book’s author himself? Is it the influential 70s musician? The young man who once had a tryst with Motörhead drumer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor? The 9/11 survivor turned conspiracy theorist? The woman in the failing marriage? And is that woman the same as the musician? Sometimes there are clear markers of exactly who the reader is following, but more often the book checks in on the present lives of these people unmoored from any particular past or future.
Midway through the book, author Chris Eaton writes that life is “the sum of a series of unrelated stories,” a line that stands as a clear mission statement for this project. Eaton is attempting to reimagine the novel for a world in which the notion of personal identity is more slippery and difficult to pin down than ever before, thanks to the fracturing effects of social media and metadata paradoxically diluting our collective sense of self. It’s easy to imagine the author, bored one evening and plugging his name into Google to see what happens, discovering a whole world of other Chris Eatons who are responsible for an array of activities both remarkable and mundane. It’s easy to imagine the author then reconsidering his own existence in relation to these people with his name, wondering where he begins and where they end, if there is any connection between them or if it’s all just coincidence. We have all done this, even if some of us are embarrassed to admit it. According to the internet, I am a writer, but I am also a bagpiper (see: “Who’s Who in Bagpiping?”), a sad-eyed COO of a software company, a Global Competency Manager at an oil company, a different kind of writer, a stock broker, an investment manager, another stock broker, a boxer, still another stock broker, and a fictional sheriff on the TV show The Mentalist. There are hundreds of confirmed cases of Tom McAllister in the world – all of them, as far as I can tell, are white males, many of them seem to have jobs that require wearing collared shirts and ties, roughly half of them are overweight, and we live in at least thirty-seven different US states. Each of these men represents a different permutation on a theme, one of the infinite possibilities for the life of a given Tom McAllister, a concept that is somewhat comforting in the we are not alone sense but also confounding and maybe a little hopeless when followed to its logical endpoint, especially since any effort to develop a coherent narrative of the collective is bound to result in loose ends and strained connections.
After detailing the story of a young boy who claims to be a time traveler stuck in the body of a child, Eaton writes:
“But that, of course, is just one possibility among infinite, and these millions and billions and kajillions of singularities are all operating simultaneously, starting over and over and over, opening themselves up to countless repeated lives, always room for one more, out of sequence, taking you back three days, then three years, then thirty, then a minute, then a million, as if filling in the gaps, like defragging a computer, or the memory of a dying man, until all the pieces make a life, and even if the life you’re currently living is horrible beyond belief, none of it really matters because eventually your life is gone as you know it.”
The book is bursting with passages like this, contemplating the metaphorical meanings of these many overlapping lives, the metaphysical strain of trying to comprehend them all, weighing the endless potential represented by our lives at the start versus the sense that the choices we make may not matter in the end. Some of these passages, like the one above, are energetic and insightful and compelling, but after a while the book becomes soggy with philosophical exposition. By the midpoint of the novel, there have been fourteen such passages, ranging in length from a single paragraph to a few pages; each is interesting on its own, but they become repetitive as they accumulate, not building off of one another but rather giving the sense of narrative wheel-spinning. The book insists upon reiterating its purpose so often that after 200 pages, you still feel like you’re just getting started. Another example:
“Something happens, we tell someone else, we obfuscate, the story changes, it becomes the new truth.
We create our own identities.
By telling stories.”
And another:
“In fact, perhaps our imaginations are just a link to a collective unconscious, so that the thoughts we happen to stumble across while holding the hand of a dying lover, or staggering from the cafeteria to the bathroom, or tossing spoiled food into the furnace room because there’s nowhere else for it to go and throwing it outside just attracts more wild animals and looters, are really just pinhole exposures into actual events somewhere else on the planet.”
I reject the phrase “novel of ideas” on principle because all novels have ideas in them, even bad novels filled with bad ideas. But: this book is very much focused on the philosophical, less so on plot and character development and the sort of things one often expects from contemporary North American fiction. It is an investigation into our sense of the self and how we determine not only who we will be but how we even know who we are to begin with. Many of the individual protagonists are interesting enough people, but some of them aren’t rendered with much complexity, due to the demands of the novel to keep moving further and further away from them in pursuit of grander ideas. The intellectual goals of the book erect barriers between the reader and the people who are the ostensible subjects of the book. So, rather than investigating the totality of these people, what the novel sometimes does is present a relatively flat portrayal of someone who is noteworthy only because of his or her name, and then moves on to another person tangentially related to that person. It is easy to get lost amid the names and half-finished plot arcs, especially because within the stories of the individual Eatons, the free-floating narrator is prone to layers of convoluted digression.
Just one example of the digressive voice that dominates the narrative: advice columnist Chris Eaton receives a letter about an adult film star named Ian Dowd. Eaton once worked with Ian Dowd, pre-porn (this association was plotted early in the book, but after confronting so many names that never returned, I confess that I’d forgotten this detail). He becomes obsessed with tracking down information on his former acquaintance. This quest leads to many online searches, which narrow his list down to a number of people who have used this stage name, and then he finds himself interested in an actor who worked with Ian Dowd, so we get a full page sketch of that actor. Following that trail leads him to an academic study on pornography, which is explained in some detail, and then eventually to a porn star named Tina Cerosz, whose life story is described over the course of several pages, including further digressions into the story of her father and also her grandfather, who was involved in the Polish resistance. Eaton never finds the information he’s looking for. The section ends and is not referenced again.
Is it possible for a reader to care about all of these people? It is not possible. There are limits to the extent of our compassion and empathy. Eventually, each person just becomes another name added to the pile. From one section to the next, there is little variety in tone, pace, voice, or diction; there is just a relentless march of new person after new person.
Presumably, Chris Eaton is aware of limits of human empathy, and is aware that his readers will not finish this book having intimately known or cared about or even remembered every character. These digressions, then, serve as explorations of the limits of our capacity to care, and also illustrations of the endless, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconish web of associations that have formed between us and all the people in our lives. It’s an extremely ambitious idea to try to illustrate this phenomenon within a novel. But I suggest this is a case where the ambition outstrips the execution.
The book is committed to excess—when a character takes on a task, he or she does so in a fanatical manner, as in the valet parking attendant who becomes obsessed with the idea of maximizing the space efficiency of his lot and spends all night arranging and rearranging the cars until he discovers the ideal layout. Characters’ interests are often detailed in a series of what the book itself calls “prosaic and wearisome lists,” many of which seem inessential to the book. This commitment to excess is the novel’s ultimate undoing, as there is no clear principle of selection at work. Some of the best bits in here—a list of ideas for movie sequels (“The Ramboer War – Rambo travels through time to fight in South Africa and makes sure apartheid never happened”), a Cowboys and Indians-themed birthday party supervised by a mother who made the children sign treaties with one another, the anecdote of a man trying to cover his body with tattoos of every country in the world but giving up when he couldn’t keep up with all the political turmoil in Eastern Europe—are funny and inventive and smart, but each of these individual moments don’t seem to add up to something greater. And there are an equal number of examples of unsatisfying detours into, for example, a painstakingly detailed description of the minutiae of gameplay issues in 80s video games, or the ideal chemical makeup of fertile soil.
By the final chapter, the various Chris Eatons are aging and facing their own mortality, coping with regrets of lives gone wrong, or at least gone not-entirely-right. One character is convinced “he’d made all the wrong choices in life.” Many are professionally unfulfilled and realize they’ve failed to live up to the limitless potential promised in the early going. Others are sick or have watched loved ones die. They, and the novel, are now in a reflective mode:
“When we grow older, we become more sentimental, more challenged by artistic depictions of death, depravity, travesty, tragedy, horror, sadness. As children, death is something we don’t even understand, something we watch like a ceiling fan then forget, something we long to put in our mouths. As adolescents, we are trained to be more cynical. Awkwardness teaches us to laugh at these things. But as we grow older, we become more affected, by these films, these stories, because our experience has shown them to be true. All of them. Each horrible event in our lives makes us realize that anything is possible.
Probable.
Has actually happened.
Is actually happening.”
This is one of the strongest passages in the book, one of those moments when everything comes together and the voice and content match, when the metaphors and philosophical musings have real weight due to an accumulation of actual life events behind them, and the wistful tone serves the narrative perfectly. But dropped amid even more digressive pages filled with inconsequential characters, it serves to highlight my primary frustration with this book—there isn’t a strong enough editorial instinct on display, so that its effort to share everything sometimes inhibits its ability to connect with a reader who wants to know that the things they’re reading matter and are there for a reason.
Because Chris Eaton: A Biography is determined to break free of the form of the traditional novel, it’s not fair to criticize it for not adhering to the tropes of traditional novels. But it is fair to say that it never fully delivers on the promise of an ambitious and inventive conceit. In a way, the novel models the fractured way one lives in the world today, through its lack of focus, its information overload, its occasional profundity springing from mundane moments. But perhaps it also stands as an unintentional rebuke to living the way we do, trying so hard to consume every morsel of information while actually consuming nothing at all.
March 26, 2020
Очень ветвистый, но завораживающий текст о множественных Крисах Итонах (включая геев и девочек) и их предках, друзьях и знакомых, собирающихся мозаикой в некий коллективный образ, пронизанный альтернативным духом Пинчона, его же игрой с реальностью и совершенно чарующей безалаберностью. Местами отдает и Николсоном Бейкером. Каждый минисюжет здесь, к тому же, построен как коан или стихотворение в прозе, что добавляет кайфа, не говоря о чудесных фантазия��, вроде полностью вымышленной истории финского модернизма, псевдоисторической байки о валлийском изобретателе спального мешка и его непростых взаимоотношениях с Наполеоном или мифа о мелком греческом боге Анахорете. Все это совершенно бесценная россыпь цветных камешков, лучше всего описываемая прекрасным словом whimsy.
April 11, 2014
Have you ever Googled your own name and wondered about the people that you share it with? Well, Chris Eaton has and the result is a work of fiction centered around the lives of various male and female Chris Eatons along with a few other quirky characters.
Perhaps we all know, have met, crossed paths with, a Chris Eaton in our own lives? I know I have, he's a charming Englishman who works at our Sydney head office and briefly worked with me in Queensland a few years ago.
You won't find a linear story here, but what you will find is your life paralleled with one of the Chris Eatons within the narrative. Encompassing a broad spectrum of lives lived, this is by turns a funny but thought provoking novel. At various points I did think that I was re-reading Moby Dick with the amount of facts and figures being presented on a multitude of topics, whether true or not I'm not sure as I don't think that the narrator was altogether reliable at times, but some of it was very interesting.
I did, to my surprise, find myself really enjoying this book. It was very well written, and I was interested in many of the topics (punk rock, salt ...... otoliths). There were many thoughts, feelings and interactions in this novel that I could identify with, and it made me realise that we are ALL THE SAME. We don't need to share the same name to experience the same hopes, fears, loves and life lessons.
This really is something different to read, and I can recommend it as a well written thought provoking independent novel.
Perhaps we all know, have met, crossed paths with, a Chris Eaton in our own lives? I know I have, he's a charming Englishman who works at our Sydney head office and briefly worked with me in Queensland a few years ago.
You won't find a linear story here, but what you will find is your life paralleled with one of the Chris Eatons within the narrative. Encompassing a broad spectrum of lives lived, this is by turns a funny but thought provoking novel. At various points I did think that I was re-reading Moby Dick with the amount of facts and figures being presented on a multitude of topics, whether true or not I'm not sure as I don't think that the narrator was altogether reliable at times, but some of it was very interesting.
I did, to my surprise, find myself really enjoying this book. It was very well written, and I was interested in many of the topics (punk rock, salt ...... otoliths). There were many thoughts, feelings and interactions in this novel that I could identify with, and it made me realise that we are ALL THE SAME. We don't need to share the same name to experience the same hopes, fears, loves and life lessons.
This really is something different to read, and I can recommend it as a well written thought provoking independent novel.
May 8, 2016
An homage to the age of Googling your own name, this novel is an "biography" constructed from all the actual lives of the other Chris Eatons that come up in the author's search results. So Chris Eaton can be an athletic guy in one passage, a clever girl in another, etc. It's an interesting literary experiment, and a lot of the vignettes are genuinely fascinating in a stranger-than-fiction way; but ultimately the changing people meant that it didn't hold my attention the way a normal novel would. There wasn't a single protagonist to get attached to, just a lot of various stories. It's like just browsing through search results instead of actually choosing a single page to visit.
July 23, 2015
By all means this is a very ambitious book that has just the kind of quirky tangents I like. I enjoyed reading about strange characters like Hornet Cisa amid the numerous Chris Eatons this book speaks of. But it's all a bit too flighty for me, and it was hard to piece together a coherent story for most of the Chris Eatons.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews