The Best of the Backlist: Haven Kimmel

The Best of the Backlist

A look at worthy authors you may not know, focusing on their entire collection of in-stock backlist titles. The backlist is a great way to meet some new authors and get a sense of their work.

Haven Kimmel

www.havenkimmell.com

Haven Kimmel’s novels are populated with finely-drawn characters who may not necessarily be particularly likeable, although they are certainly believable. Plot, too, is strong and compelling; add to that Kimmel’s philosophical, theological, and literary background and you’ve got a series of engrossing novels, as well as a few memoirs. And if you think her book titles are snappy and unique, wait until you see what’s inside….

In The Solace of Leaving Early, the officious Langston Braverman has walked out of her Ph.D. oral defense and come straight home to nowhere Indiana, where she most assuredly does not belong and where she isn’t equipped to do anything but pout and make people miserable. Langston is clueless about everything real and responds to the most common or mundane comment with some snippet of existential philosophy. But there’s something missing not just in Langston, but also in her kind and puzzled parents: a lost brother, and a distant and unloving grandmother. Town pastor Amos Townsend can relate. He’s losing his grip on his own ability to heal the wounded, haunted by an error in counseling leading to two deaths and making orphans of two somber little girls. Only when the two little girls become Langston’s charges and she buys completely into their strange world does Langston—and ultimately Amos—find something real and worthy of their talents. What ties all the main and peripheral characters together is loss: each has lost someone very important, and it’s not the ones who are gone who get our sympathy, it is the ones who are left. As Langston notes about one incident with her now-gone brother “…he was handing her the sweetest possibility this life has to offer: to leave in the middle, while everyone else stays behind and waits for the heroine to die in the cold.”

In Something Rising, Light and Swift Kimmel gives us another bright heroine in Cassie Claiborne, a 30-year old who has spent her life spending her anger, but who finds a way to purpose her rage by playing pool. For Cassie is an amazing pool player, and she does have reasons for her rage. Her father always sets her up for disappointment, living with another woman and charming his way through life. Her mother is a depressed doormat, woe is she, and her friends are a collection of people whose motto might have been “I should have….” Cassie needs to rise above her past as the “angry girl” and her present as “the strong girl” so that she can claim the dignity she craves and rise above her lot in small-town life. That she accomplishes these by becoming a professional pool-shooter is astounding; how Kimmel can tell us precisely what is inside Cassie’s head as she’s making her shots is even more astounding.

The final book in Kimmel’s loose trilogy set in the Midwest presents us with three strong and unique women. Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah each inhabit The Used World. Each woman has her own secret and her own burden. One is unattractive and lonely, another pregnant by an absent man but stuck living with her loveless, religious father, another on the perpetual outside owing to sexual preference. The nexus point for all of them is an antiques/trinket shop which is the place that all ungainly and unloved objects—and people—converge. While each tries a different way (shopping at a box store, for example) each comes to realize that the shoddy and used is deeper and more beautiful than the new. Solace’s Pastor Amos appears here as well, providing theological questions and answers for all, many concerning the nature of faith and spirituality, but also those focused on sexuality, death, and family relationships. While many fans of Kimmel did not find this the most interesting of her books, it is the most beautifully written. Some passages will simply make you stop and dog ear the page, even if you find it sinful to spindle a book.

Kimmel’s most controversial novel is Iodine, the first of her novels to be set outside of the small world of small-town Indiana. Get your literature and mythology reference books handy, as Kimmel gives us Trace, a woman who narrates her life using references to mythology, psychoanalysis, and even modern-day science to help make sense of it. Does she ever? Does the reader ever? Not really; I think each reader makes something different of the story, and certainly the ending. Along the way, some of the story is clear: Trace has had an abusive and strange childhood, one which clearly has contributed to her frequent dissociative states (unless, of course, she really was part of strange church rites and abandoned as a child). When the novel opens she and her trusty canine Iodine are living in a shack in the woods while she is wowing college professors and journaling about the past, trying to make sense of the present but not really planning for the future. It’s possible that a childhood friend has the key, but conversations with Candy, the friend, muddy the waters further. In a clear time, Trace abandons her life, marries her psychology professor, works toward becoming country-clubish, leaves her dog (her muse, perhaps?) to fend for itself…and promptly loses it again when she develops paranoid delusions that her husband wishes to kill her. (He’s pretty obnoxious, but it’s doubtful he’s going that far.) Whether Trace pulls out of it, and what the truth is, are never revealed, leaving readers to work it out themselves. No reader I’ve met has the same take on the ending!

In all, Kimmel’s novels give us lovely and sad women struggling against loss, working on transcending the past. To get some idea of how Kimmel became this writer, two memoirs (of a sort) can help: A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch. Here we start in small-town Indiana, with the Jarvis family. Zippy is a tomboy, freakishly funny and irreverent, and the child of parents who don’t really seem as though they came from small-town Indiana. Her mother is brilliant, but fat and couch-bound (to start in Zippy; her getting up is the stuff of the second book). Her dad is authoritative, a gambler, and ultimately a sheriff’s deputy—the gun in his hands isn’t the best idea, perhaps. (You can see vestiges of him later in Cassie’s father in Something Rising…) The neighbors are multitudinous (children, dogs), the best friends true, the grandmother colorful, and the older sister venal and torturous, but no matter what Zippy is scrappy and fun. She is also a good observer, which is pretty clear when you read the novels—she’s missed little about the complexities of live, love, and loss.