Zippy
Rides Again! (Sort Of)
Haven Kimmel
Pours Some Iodine on the Wounded
By John Hood
It’s been
seven years since Haven Kimmel broke into the Best Book lists
with her startlingly frank and outwardly funny memoir, A Girl
Named Zippy. In that time there’s been a three-piece of
place (the novels The Solace of Leaving Early,
Something Rising [Light and Swift] and The Used World),
a second look back (She Got up off the Couch), a book for
swift kids (Orville: A Dog Story) and a retelling of
Revelation for the hard-cover companion to the über-hip
online belief-sheet Killing the Buddha.
And as if
those weren’t already more than many writers write in a
lifetime, she’s now unleashed Iodine (Free Press $24), a
novel that reads like the result of all of the above — through
the eyes of a stalker.
Okay, not
quite. But the dame at the center of the story is oddly
stalkable (and duly stalked), even as she too is kinda on the
stalk.
But I
aggress. Before we core it’s necessary to know who’s
holding the knife, which in this case seems to be two keen
women, each inhabiting the same body.
One is
Iaanthe Covington, a name stolen from a gravestone and used to
hide behind in a Midwestern campus full of prying eyes. In
lesser hands, the tag would be terribly difficult to live up to
— or to live down. But Kimmel isn’t a lesser hand at anything.
And neither is this overlayered Gothette with Jet Grape hair and
lips, who’s got a mind that can link Lear to love-loss without
skipping an Ibsen.
True also for
Trace Pennington. Sister of a meth-wracked mother of missing
children and friend to a frequent abductee, Trace has her
daddy’s truck, her daddy’s dog and her daddy’s long lashes. Oh
yeah, and she keeps an old, abandoned, kerosene-heated
homestead.
Together the
two encroach upon each other until the lines begin to blur, the
lies begin to true and the lives begin to be too much for one
small girl’s body to handle, even if her mind is as big as the
Pacific. So she turns outward, to her friend, to her family and
to a nutty professor who has read every book in the world and
still isn’t half as keen as he thinks he is.
Trace is,
though; so smart, in fact, that she could outsmart herself if
she wanted to. And with the amount of know in that noggin of
hers, she just might. Imagine having all of history’s thoughts
and theories right at the tip of your tongue and rarely saying a
word. It’s a heady mix, all right, and the rarefied air could
leave you breathless.
It can’t be
easy to write learned and not come off like a showoff, nor can
it be simple to set even a part of a story at a university and
not end up like a yawn. I mean, hell, we’ve all been there
before, right? Maybe. But not like this. See, Iodine
is less about some erudite professor wowing a starry-eyed
student, and more about what happens when that student has her
starry eyes gouged out, and begins to see. Kinda sorta really
just like Zippy, only different.
I slipped Ms.
Kimmel 13 of my trademark either/ors; here’s what she slipped
back:
Archetype or
alien?
Archetypes,
certainly. Aliens are only for some, but archetypes are
EVERYWHERE.
Bees or
bobcats?
Bees for
poetry; bobcats in reality. Oooo, I love me some bobcats.
Pigs or
coyotes?
Coyotes,
although they’re meaner than you think.
Acorns or
walnuts?
Acorns. They
eventually become giant trees.
Circuses or
rodeos?
Circuses are
for dreams; rodeos are thrilling.
Memory or
imagination?
There’s so
little difference I don't know how to answer.
Yoknapatawpha
or Winesburg?
Yoknapatawpha
if you want your genius raw; Winesburg if you want to visit
someplace that seems real.
Rain Man or
Wolf Man?
Wolf Man.
Rain Man would be so tiresome.
Peter Murphy
or Robert Smith?
Oooh, ow. I
never stop listening to Robert Smith, but Peter Murphy is like a
ghost you love and can’t give up.
Flannery
O'Connor or Eudora Welty?
This hurts me
mightily and if you tell Ms. Welty I'll call you a liar, but oh
it’s always, always Flannery.
Elizabeth
Bishop or Emily Dickinson?
Dickinson.
Dickinson. Dickinson. (But Elizabeth Bishop — touched by the
gods, as well.)
Durham, Raleigh, Muncie, Oxford and Miami? How does South Florida fit into
that mix?
Certainly not
geographically. I love South Florida, but I’m really coming just
to see Mitchell Kaplan, that handsome devil.
Haven Kimmel
reads from
Iodine, at
8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 4, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave.,
Coral Gables. For more information call 305-442-4408.
