Review of Michael Kimball’s DEAR EVERYBODY

There are two books I can remember that ever made me physically cry. There were the rape scenes in Saramago’s Blindness, and there was nearly every chapter of Michael Kimball’s How Much of Us There Was. While the first hurt because it was so brutal, Kimball’s was a softer kind of invocation--as I read it in a bathtub, I could not shake the feeling of being held, as if somehow the words had interlaced my skin. This is the essence of the magic Michael Kimball holds--his sentences come on so taut, so right there, and yet somehow so calming, it's as if you are being visited by some lighted presence.

Over the last 8 years, Michael Kimball has released three book-length works of fiction, starting in 2000 with The Way the Family Got Away, followed in 2005 by the How Much of Us There Was and now, upon this end of summer 2008, his newest, Dear Everybody. With each, Kimball managed to completely reinvent his storytelling with a Stanley Crawford kind of scope, based at its essence around Kimball’s syllable-perfect syntax and massive sentences. Each book, like each of Kimball’s lines, manages to really do something that so many books seem to have forgotten how to do--say something, say it wholly new, say it in a way that will not be said so well again. Which is why right now is a time for celebration.

Dear Everybody tells the story of a suicide in letters, a weatherman gone lost in his own exasperation, writing to seemingly every person he’s ever known, to give them something to remember. The narrative, rendered in brief fragments culled from those letters and interspersed with the intended recipient’s reactions as well as other strange apocrypha, follows Bender up from his birth through middle childhood among a tearing family, among schoolmates who would never get him right, into later years of college with the awkward arc of women, sex and lack of, peculiar job arrangements, etc. Bender writes to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny. He writes to what seems like every woman he ever touched (or wanted to touch, or thought about). In the surrounding documentation, culled from the postmortem go-through of Bender’s things by his brother, we are exposed to the sadness not by wallowing, but by the subtle--Bender’s newsclippings of mass death, his crossed out to-do lists, his catalog of shortcomings. The collaged passages create a strand of locks so long that there’s barely time to blink, and yet you would not blink even if you could, the book moves so right and quick.

It is through the moment-to-moment minutiae of the novel, the synchronicity and attention to detail in Kimball’s razor phrasings, by which the hardest pins are poked. Kimball doesn’t need pages and pages to crush you. He needs maybe three lines, and so this novel, then, is like a series of small incisions, one after another, some meant to tickle, some to burn, some to open up the brain with laughter in the lighter moments, the sudden gulps of air among the wake. There’s no room for breathing in Dear Everybody, except for where Kimball allows it, nothing in each paragraph but blood, carried in sentences so lean the only way to describe them is to reiterate:

These kind of spare evocations, stated evenly, even in the face of great sadness, are one of the keys to Kimball’s prowess. There is little hysteria in the horror, there is only the pacing, as from someone truly gone, which makes Dear Everybody’s tone so effective and even refreshing (even in the mind of suicide), and, ultimately, a great delight. Kimball renders his characters’ minds with such close-knit poise that it’s easy to forget you are reading, that you have eyes. The overall effect is somewhat like the language of an observant alien or child, a presence leading you through its disconnection to show you what it learned.

In the end, Kimball’s Dear Everybody is a book both intricate and new, painful and engaging, tapping on the clearest rendering of what is human, on the importance of the rhythm of each word. Dear Everybody is so many things--a collage, a hypnosis, an invention, a thing of awe, perhaps a warning--a work of new that will no doubt linger in your mind and in your stomach and in your aging skin for quite some time.