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Other Voices, Other Rooms was Truman Capote’s first novel, and I have picked it up because it was referenced in The Used World. Such is the power of Haven Kimmel.

This is a strange, spooky, sad tale, beginning with an unwanted child: we meet 13-year-old Joel as he’s hitching a ride en route from New Orleans to a crumbling estate in Mississippi. He had been living with his aunt following his mother’s death; now he has been summoned to his father, who he’s never met. Upon arriving at Skully’s Landing, he finds no father, but an odd stepmother and her even odder cousin, Randolph. Approximating friends are a neighbor tomboy named Idabel and a black servant named Zoo. Eventually Joel’s father is revealed, mute, bedridden, and as horrifying as everything and everyone else at the Landing. Among these horrors are a ghostly woman in a window where no woman belongs; a cottonmouth “thick as his leg, long as a whip”; and a mule who hangs himself.

Randolph is clearly gay, and a model for the effeminate Joel to consider, for better or for worse – sexuality aside, Randolph has a dubious moral code. He relates (among other things) the story of how he met Joel’s father, in an episode that rather reminded me of The Sun Also Rises, in which a motley mismatch of characters in a debauched setting (here, New Orleans) are remarkably frank about who wants who sexually. Later, when Joel attends a country fair with Idabel, things turn more towards Alice in Wonderland, in its sinister moments. But Capote is in his own class here, regardless of my literary comparisons. He evokes a startling, ghostly, creepy, sleepy yet stark atmosphere, and for me, that atmosphere was the great accomplishment of this novel.

Plot-wise, Joel’s story is one where not a great deal happens but a major life change takes place, anyway. This is a coming-of-age story, in which Joel starts off decidedly a child but finishes – just a few months later – a young man with a somewhat clearer picture of himself. (But, I think, no happier.) Part of that coming-of-age regards his sexuality, but only in an unstated, amorphous way, which is a fair description of the whole book, really. In fact, I have to admit to some trouble following things, as so much is unstated and wavering and strangely expressed from varying and unreliable viewpoints. That this novel is at least vaguely autobiographical I guessed; that there were themes of understanding one’s sexuality and coming-of-age was clear to me. But the rest was less clear. In fact I was reminded somewhat (to drop another literary name) of Faulkner, a la The Sound and the Fury. I won’t bother regurgitating it for you here – they are not my own interpretations – but even Wikipedia (for example) gets way more out of this story than I got. Go figure.

I think Other Voices, Other Rooms is likely to be another great candidate for a “close reading” with a knowledgeable guide – I picture my high school English teacher, Mrs. Smith – to direct related readings and fill me in on the background. Without such assistance, I still enjoyed a creepy, weird tale of cobwebbed, forgotten Southern grandeur and depravity. Take it as you will. If nothing else, Capote’s talent shines through and foreshadows his future success – but I still prefer In Cold Blood.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Haven Kimmel, misc fiction | 1 Comment »

My love affair with Haven Kimmel continues.

Billed as the third in a “loose” trilogy begun with The Solace of Leaving Early and continued with Something Rising (Light and Swift), The Used World inhabits the same space but doesn’t share many of the same characters. In fact, I couldn’t connect any characters from Something Rising, although several are tangential to Solace. I looked again, and Amazon (et al) calls this a “trilogy of place,” so, okay. I’ll start there. The place is Hopwood County, Indiana, and the little town of Jonah. Presumably it is based in part on Kimmel’s own hometown in that state. There are drugs and dysfunction and small-town bigotry and meanness, but it’s not all bad; there are also big-hearted people and open minds, and Pastor Amos Townsend (you’ve seen his name before in an earlier book review) is a bright star. I like that he is simultaneously transcendent, intelligent, & thoughtful, and deeply fallible & human. He has company, in this book, in the three women of a secondhand shop called Hazel Hunnicutt’s Used World Emporium.

Hazel is the proprietor, in her 60’s, decidedly eccentric and devoted to her aged mother and her cats. She turns out (naturally) to have an interesting history which I won’t get into here. Claudia Modjeski is a loner and accustomed to being stared at: she is 6’5″ and well-built, and occasionally gets called sir. And then there’s Rebekah Shook, a fragile woman who only recently escaped her father’s hellfire-and-brimstone cult of condemnation and is still being made to pay for it. Into their lives come a baby boy quite literally forgotten at a nearby meth camp, and an unwanted pregnancy, and everyone’s world shifts a little.

As I’ve said about all the Kimmel books I’ve read recently, this is lovely. She has a fine, crystallized perspective on middle America. The language continues to be stunning: Kimmel is a word wizard. The erudition present in her other books I’ve read, where one or more characters are so cerebral and caught up in the theoretical as to be nearly loony, is not so much present here; but there is decidedly more religious nuttiness. There are really good people, but also less good things (case in point: forgotten baby at meth camp). As a recurring theme, romance and beauty will blossom in the most unlikely places, and I confess I’m a sucker for that. Watch closely for the little details. I had to go back and reread a bit to track a character who starts off as insignificant and suddenly looms. Kimmel is a tricky one. Subtlety. Surprises.

I may have to stop reviewing her books. I feel inadequate.

Next up: Kimmel’s best-known, award-winning memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, about which I am (understandably, I think) excited, but also nervous because I don’t always agree with the general consensus about which book is an author’s best. I am also excited, perhaps even more so, about her later memoir of her mother, entitled She Got Up Off the Couch – not least because I hope to write my mother’s memoir one day, too.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Haven Kimmel, misc fiction | 2 Comments »

Langston Braverman has recently returned to her hometown of Haddington, Indiana. Very close to receiving her PhD she walked out of her oral exams. She is a strange, exceptionally erudite but socially fragile and problematic young woman. She has a dog named Germane: “named not after Germaine Greer, but as in: Germane to this conversation.” (I love that.)

Amos Townsend is Haddington’s pastor, of only a year or two now. He is tormented by the death of a local named Alice; he feels that he should have been able to stop her death, and he is struggling with his faith, which is actually nothing new.

Alice’s two children are left in limbo; their crazy aunt Gail has turned out to be unfit, and their grandmother Beulah is clearly too near death herself to wrangle with two traumatized little girls. Upon Alice’s death, they dispose of their original names, Madeline and Eloise, and state that they are now called Immaculata and Epiphany. They wear costumes from a Renaissance drama from school, that their mother made, all the time. Complete with hats: the tall cone-shaped kind with ribbons streaming off the tops.

Langston’s mother AnnaLee picks up some of the slack, and then insists that Langston step up: she is not in school, not working, and these children need her. Of course, Amos plays a role as well, so that this village will truly raise a child.

Langston and Amos are the stars of this story (along with the striking Immaculata and Epiphany, of course). When they meet, they repel one another like magnets. Despite sharing tastes and interests in reading, philosophy, theology, and (I can’t stress this enough) their particular brands of weird, they repel. And, as is clearly a theme in Kimmel’s work, the cerebral content, the philosophies and theologies that shape this part of the story are complex and thoroughly explored. I think I said this in my last Kimmel review, but: her many references partly pique me to go off and study, and partly exhaust me, making me so glad I don’t have to read Whitehead and Tillich and Frithjof Schuon. It makes me sit back and …wonder… that all these strange, complex, learned thoughts that Langston has are thoughts that Kimmel had to have first, had to conceive to put them in her heroine’s mouth; think of that.

Immaculata and Epiphany see Mary (the Mother of God) in the dogwood tree in their grandmother Beulah’s backyard. Naturally, because that is the kind of world this is. It is very strange and is a kind of beautiful, and again I observe that Kimmel’s gift is to create a midwestern small-town world that is both hopelessly humdrum and depressing and everyday, and also strange and exalted and worthy of examination.

What happens to our exquisitely odd cast of characters should definitely remain a surprise to you, reader. It’s pretty great, though.

I love this author SO MUCH that I am struggling to write reviews; but I will keep reading her. Next up is The Used World, and I am, of course, working to get my hands on her best-known bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy.

I’ll close, as I tend to with Kimmel, with a few lines from the book that particularly caught my eye. Where these have, in the past, been lovely examples of her use of language, these are more concepts that I really liked. There is a book theme here. And the language is great – observe the curry comb, is that an image or what – but it’s the concepts that I like most here:

Amos knew as well as anyone what went into writing a book, having written a master’s thesis, and he considered the process to be akin to having one’s nerves stripped with a curry comb.

Maybe he knows what goes into writing a book as well as anyone… who hasn’t written a book?

The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were wasting both time and food.

Me too, Amos. I’m right there with you.

Amos tapped his fingers on his bony knees. “Why do you have a book and I don’t?”

“Because I’m a woman, Amos.”

“Yes, but why do you have a book and I never do in a situation like this?”

AnnaLee put the book down. “I carry a bag. I also have safety pins and emergency money, and a package of those little wet towelettes. We live in Indiana. I could get stopped by a train, I could get bored. I always carry a book.” She went back to reading.

How perfect is that. “We live in Indiana, Amos!” Perhaps it goes without saying that I, too, try to keep a book with me at all times? I fail on safety pins and wet towelettes, though.

I’m sure I’ve failed to do this book justice. But it’s divine.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Haven Kimmel, misc fiction | 2 Comments »

This is my new favorite author. I can’t even tell you… I want to read this book aloud to strangers and shout and cry. I adore her. What a powerful book, and story, and what wordsmithing.

I will tell you very little about the plot of Iodine. Its protagonist is a young woman named Trace, who also goes by Ianthe. The perspective shifts between a third person view of Ianthe and a third person view of Trace and a first person voice, in which the woman who is both women narrates; and she is the quintessential unreliable narrator. She relates memories and then states that they never happened. Her story is revealed slowly and disjointedly, in such stingy scraps that I had to go back and reread, trying to wring out the detail; but the effect is more tantalizing than awkward or confusing the way mixed-up timelines can be.

It is a disturbing story. Trace, along with the other characters we slowly come to know, has a history that upsets us. There is a strong thread of incestuous and otherwise inappropriate sexual longings running through this book (as we saw in those opening lines). Be prepared to be a little uncomfortable at times; but oh, the payoff. And again I give you the beautiful language:

Her red hair was curled and teased and sprayed into an elaborate dome; there were waves and… like the outline of paisleys, it was busy, stiff, bright hair. Not the red she was born with – this was the color of a ripe cantaloupe mixed with blood.

Kimmel has many strengths. Her prose is also poetry. She can characterize a minor player in just a few lines so crisply that I recognize a thoroughly unique and yet familiar man or woman.

Scherring was less a man than a character in a short story, and it was a story Trace rather liked; she liked how the years had disappointed him, and ruined that perfect family, and revealed gin to be poison to the liver.

Her characters are very real, straight from a mundane and yet terrifying Americana, and their lives are both disturbing and everyday.

Iodine is far more a psychological thriller than was Something Rising. There is more Patricia Highsmith here and less Tennessee Williams. There is also definitely something of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River, although the protagonists of the two books are different in many ways.

One aspect of Iodine that was also present in Something Rising is a study of literature, in this case of Greek myths, of archetypes, of Freud and Jung: several characters are deeply mired in academia, speaking in a language of myth & archetype, which makes for a beautiful and strange little subculture that they live in. Trace/Ianthe is both very much a part of this world, and also outside of it. I found this erudite framing element to the story very charming and also a little ridiculous, which I think is how Kimmel intended to portray it. It certainly made me interested in reading some of what Trace reads; but not all of it! (I will be looking up Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron, finally, after seeing it referred to in various places before this book.)

I think I’ve made a hash of this review. I don’t want to say much about the plot, and I can’t do Kimmel’s extraordinary talent justice. She has a lovely way with words; I would read her stories about absolutely anything, but find this damaged, disturbed microcosm of the American Midwest especially enthralling. I was riveted throughout, and upon finishing, had to just sit and absorb the effect of this story. My fascination with Kimmel continues and she remains highly recommended.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Haven Kimmel, misc fiction | 5 Comments »