Books

Missive impossible

Novelist Michael Kimball reinvents the suicide note.

By Michael Miller

According to Michael Kimball, most novelists gamble every time they sit down to write. “You spend this huge amount of time on something that might be read by no one,” the 41-year-old author tells TONY from his home in Baltimore. But this anxiety didn’t stop him from raising the stakes in his latest novel, Dear Everybody, a deeply sad, frequently comic account of the life of TV meteorologist Jonathon Bender, who commits suicide before the book opens. What’s especially risky and potentially off-putting is the story’s fragmentary mode: It’s made up of Jonathon’s many short, postcardlike suicide notes to people from his past; interviews with family members (in particular an angry and abusive father); and excerpts from eulogies given at Jonathon’s funeral. What’s more, the book has supposedly been assembled by an unreliable editor, the deceased character’s brother Robert, who by his own admission pretty much loathed Jonathon for his entire life.

Dear Everybody has already won fans as diverse as Stephen King and Dave Eggers, but Kimball says that some early readers were skeptical of his storytelling approach. “I had a friend who saw a draft of the book, and he said, ‘You can’t do this!’ ” the author recalls. “He said, ‘You have a letter and then the mother’s diary entry and then another letter, and there’s this letter about a trip to the barbershop, but there’s no description of the chair or the mirrors or all the stuff on the barber’s counter.’ ” But Kimball argues that all those images are embedded in his novel, even if they aren’t explicitly detailed. “I might not have put those descriptions in the book, but I made my friend think of all those things, and that’s what I was going for. I wanted to reinvent the letter.”

And he does: In addition to writing stunning prose, Kimball evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional worlds lying just behind his story’s surface. In many cases, the author’s verbal compression both amplifies and dampens the tragic clamor of Jonathon’s letters, which always stop short of becoming a litany of complaints. “The danger of overexplaining a character’s sadness is that you open yourself up to sentimentality,” the author says of his decision to keep his hero’s salvos well pruned. Kimball’s concision also yields discomfiting moments of grim humor. “Thanks for my severance package,” Jonathon concludes in a note to a boss who fired him for not going to work. “I lived on it for the rest of my life.” These aren’t exactly postcards to stick on the refrigerator, but they harbor such a strange emotional power that you’ll find them hard to forget. Kimball’s risks paid off.

Dear Everybody (Alma Books, $19.95) is out Mon 1. Kimball reads with Hannah Tinti at KGB Oct 12 and with Sam Lipsyte at Word Oct 22.

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