elimae

A Review of Michael Kimball's The Way the Family Got Away
Ken Sparling

Kimball enters that territory where everything has changed. When a baby dies, everything has changed. But Kimball isn't just about that. He's about the death of something in language, something hopeful, like the stretch of life out in front of a baby, that hope of starting out to get somewhere.
Kimball is about the death of that hope as it rears up in language. Kimball is about a new hope that exists in defiance of the lie that crawls through the linear character of the written word, the left, right, down, down toward the back cover.

There are strange and dangerous gestures.

"My mother wouldn't let anybody else hold my brother even when their mother talked like a baby talks and held her arms out for him. Their mother said that she wanted to practice with him some but my mother said the baby might break and she wouldn't let go of him. Their family's baby wasn't born yet and their mother cradling my brother in her arms might have killed the baby inside her stomach. Nobody else was supposed to touch my brother anymore or somebody else besides him might die in some other family or house."

There are also familiar, safe gestures.

"We drove away from them and they waved at us from their driveway and we waved back through our car windows."

The safe gestures might save us. Kimball never says. Just gives us the gestures. They might save us enough to know we are doomed, and in showing us our doom in the very safety of the gesture, Kimball threatens to save us. But you just can't know.

"Another one of them carried a chair. Another one of them carried another chair. Their arms and the other parts of them were all large. They made the doorways small with themselves and the furniture they carried out of the rooms, away down the hallway, and out of our house - table, lamp, table and chairs, dresser and dresser, bed and bed and bed."

Kimball makes the doorways smaller, grabs the world the way a child might to make it smaller so he doesn't choke on it.
I like that Kimball isn't afraid to give us all three beds, not as all the beds, or even as three beds. He doesn't take a single one of those beds away from us - he gives us "bed and bed and bed." Kimball doesn't take away. He makes the world small for us, stands his big self in the little covers of his book and makes the world small, but he doesn't take anything away. He makes the world small by giving it all to us in one small space the way a child makes the world small, not to put off the rest of the world until later, but to make a whole world out of the small. The child's world is always everything they have right there and that's how Kimball, a grownup, can give us everything at once. A child doesn't whittle the world, but makes of each instance all there is to be made. One thing is everything in that world.

Sometimes, you can't help but feel you are learning something important. I think it comes down to what you don't expect suddenly feeling obvious. Kimball says, "The other people that got our stuff stayed where they were at. Our stuff kept them there."
Stuff keeps you where you are, and getting rid of stuff frees you. That's something we all know. We've all heard it. We've heard it so much we've come to believe it. Kimball makes it true again, but then gives you the price you have to pay to get that freedom and it's death. Some of us want to practice death, so we get rid of our stuff. Some of us have to practice death, so we keep as much stuff as we can.

We all read stories, real or not, where people die, where babies die, and we say we hate it but we read it and read it, in the newspapers, in the books, and writers kill babies and people buy their books and read them without being able to put them down. Somehow Kimball has written a book where a baby dies that you can put down, that you need to put down to breathe, so that when you pick it up again, it's because you want to pick it up again and read something that will stop you breathing.

"We weren't ever going to get everything we traded away back. We were going to get other things in other places but nothing was ever the same thing."

"We had my brother with us but he wasn't in our family anymore. But a family needs people in it to keep going or it stops being a family."

Because it's kids trying to put things together, Kimball manages to take things apart, to tell us how things have come apart because of words, to give us the vital horror that words actually do manage us, that thinking of a family the way we do, as a group of people together in a car, or a house, or a store, that our definition can deliver words up to us, whereas words steal away the definition they sought to deliver. Family is lost the minute it becomes a formation defined by words, the minute the little girl of Kimball's book gets old enough to be the little boy of his book and the rash of world becomes word.

The way a book is produced is itself indicative of intention, a will to form, as Rank, or his inspiration, Riegl, would have put it. Kimball's book comes from a press called Four Walls Eight Windows, which is to say, it is pressed into existence, pressured, pushed out in a way the words within this pressure might deny. Even a small press book, like that upcoming from Sarki, or that already extant in Estaban, is formed beyond, but with input from, the word within, confined, constrained, set free, by the pressure of the press, which is its own unique reason beyond the books. The pressure is the pressure to number, value, statistic. This is the pressure that scripts the relationship between writer and publisher and, to some extent, the relationship between writer and reader.

Otto Rank says that: "Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form." By which I see that we have, over the centuries, devolved, if abstraction is the thing we hunger for, as science would have it. So ask yourself, when you read him, how Kimball comes into this devolution. I mean, how does his grasping for the voice of innocence move us in relation to the abstract? Is the talk more abstract, or more concrete, or has the distinction evaporated entirely in Kimball? Is he that good?

You won't want to finish this book. You'll finish it. But you won't want to. This isn't the kind of book a person wants to finish. A person wants to go back to this book. This book won't hold you prisoner. If you can't read this book it's because you can't read. You may be able to see the words, you may be able to put together a good proposal, propose a book from its given bits, find out who dies, figure out who did it. But you can't read if you can't read this book. If you put this book down partway through and you don't want to go back, you don't need to go back. If you do go back, you can count on not wanting to finish.
You'll have your reasons for not wanting to finish. Maybe you want to savor the book. Maybe you can't face the monumental task of putting together a life. There's something you can't face. If you can't face it elsewhere, you won't face it here.

Sometimes I have to go back and re-read a Kimball sentence to figure it out. The rule where I come from is, if you have to read a sentence twice, it needs fixing. Kimball breaks this rule.

Kimball's table of contents is a poem.