notes: dear everybody by michael kimball

I'd read several excerpts of Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball and was familiar with the conceit and looked forward to reading the book. I thought it would be a sadly comic story with some formal inventiveness (it was) but in the first third of the novel I started thinking, hey, this book has weight, and I was caught a little offguard by the levity, which Kimball really pours into the text. I think this thought first arrived with one of those quick glimpses of the father that are so devastating. The novel really builds into something special. The emotional weight is not overt, you don't see it, you just slowly feel it adding up; the epistolary form is so effective for this cause it strips away all the usual authorial evidence, and in Kimball's careful hands the epistolary form really gets to a special place. The assemblage of textual evidence of Jonathan's dissolution feels like a personal discovery. You don't feel as if there is a story being told, it's as if you are uncovering the story and telling it to yourself. I think that's where Kimball really succeeds, he pieces this novel together in just the right way so you don't really know that he pieced together this novel in just the right way. Of course he wrote all these pieces, and he wrote them so transparently that the specter of the novelist doesn't shadow the page. There are so many wonderfully written pieces in this book that seem to have authentically come from the characters within.

And for all the potential failure of the conceit - a booklength suicide letter - it completely succeeds. There's no saccharine sentimentality, the sentiment that is there is serious and heartfelt. I get a strong sense of honesty in Kimball's writing, he is able to think in honest terms, write honest words. He can write without getting in the way, like many writers do, asserting themselves, ironizing themselves. You can see this also in the postcard project he is writing, where he speaks with all these people, writes their beautiful and sometimes sad lives in laconic, transparent prose.

Another thought about epistolary novels...I think readers respond to the letter moreso than other forms. I think perhaps letters seem more authentic even when they are known to be fiction. The authority of the letter goes deep in the collective memory, back to the bible, to those special pleadings of Paul and Timothy, John and Jude. Or letters from religious authority or letters from legal authority, read aloud in the public square. I suppose all texts are letters of one sort or the other, a message from one station to another, but I'm thinking more the history of formal letters and informal letters. Something about letters.