Baltimore writer Michael Kimball’s Us, which I reviewed here, was named to Oprah’s summer reading list in O Magazine back in June. I asked the author if being on Oprah’s radar changed his life in any significant way, wondering if an author Oprah loves would even still remember me, and he did! Michael said his life is still pretty much the same: it was “a really nice surprise and it definitely increased sales…. but it did not change my life in any significant way. I’m not sure things like that do. They are mostly just nice blips and I just keep writing the kind of books I want to write.” Yes, but Oprah loves you, Michael. That’s got to feel good.
Posts Tagged ‘Michael Kimball’
Coming-of-age novels are common; novels about aging are far less so. It’s an inexplicably underexplored territory in contemporary fiction. Why don’t more authors write about the other end of life? Baltimore authors John Barth, in The Development (Mariner Books, October 2010), and Michael Kimball, in Us (Tyrant Books, May 2011, previously published in the UK and other English-speaking countries in 2005 as How Much of Us There Was), address what Barth calls the “last lap.” After decades of work and child-rearing and a healthy retirement in which to enjoy leisure pursuits, then what? What’s it like to face a relatively normal, timely decline and death after a reasonably pleasant life?
The residents of Heron Bay Estates, John Barth’s fictional gated community on the Eastern Shore, have it good. Mostly upper middle class, they’ve completed their largely successful, if not dramatically overachieving, careers; raised their children; and settled down in a nice, somewhat ecoconscious community near a small college town to enjoy life’s last chapter. Some are working a last few years before joining the others in “geezerdom;” many are retired or semi-retired, still writing a column for the local paper in nearby Stratford in Avon County or working from a home office. They enjoy their golf course and tennis club, among Heron Bay Estates’ amenities, along with a gate and gatekeepers to keep the low-crime surroundings at bay. After many years of marital fidelity, they have imagined affairs, though some of them might be real. The ambiguity is part of life. They attend progressive dinners and worry about a supposed peeping tom among them one summer. Their pursuits are satisfying and mundane. The real subject of The Development is the best way to die. Long and slow, like Ethel Bailey from cervical cancer, leaving her bereft spouse? Intentionally and together before the decline takes hold too strongly, as one apparently happy couple does one evening, asphyxiating themselves with the exhaust from their car in their garage? Or the Common Disaster scenario, in which both members of a couple die at once, but are each “presumed to have survived the other” to save their heirs excessive estate taxes? While they’re getting older, the environment is getting worse, the peninsula they live on sinking, due in no small part to developments like Heron Bay Estates, which, though it uses “gray water” to keep its golf course green, still HAS a golf course, and some oversized houses, and a bike path through what was once undeveloped tidewater. The precariousness of the environment parallels that of the residents’ lives. The Development appears to be narrated by different residents at different periods and from different angles: the opening narrator starts when he and his wife have made the decision to downsize from their retirement home in Heron Bay Estates to Assisted Living, and he narrates another chapter towards the end, years after their move. Most residents tell their own stories and appear in others. There’s some suggestion that the whole story is being told by a very minor character, not even part of the story, but discussion of narrator is extraneous in an otherwise well-focused book, if a story told in prism can be called focused.
The Development concentrates on the externals of aging: the retirement home, needing to urinate three times a night, winding down careers, getting affairs in order. while touching on the internal. Michael Kimball’s bittersweet Us focuses on the internal. The only characters are the narrator and his wife. She is dying and he is suffering. They try to make their last days together seem as long as possible, turning back clocks, eating slowly. “There wasn’t anything else that we wanted to do but be awake and alive with each other.” Soon she cannot eat or hold her head up. “She couldn’t open her mouth very much anymore and she could only chew slowly, but we still had all those long meals together. She would smile as much as she could after she had chewed and swallowed her food.” She doesn’t want to return to the hospital, and she dies at home in his arms. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking; the widower’s pain is exquisitely rendered. He saves her clothes in a plastic bag to try to hold onto her smell. He dresses a floor lamp in her dress and dances with it. It’s almost too intrusive even to write that sentence, as if his private pain is being broadcast. Kimball has forged that intimate a bond between reader and narrator.
Kimball says he heard the narrator’s voice and starting writing the book, then realized, being from a family of mediums, that it was his grandfather he was channeling. He includes a few sections of the character “Michael Kimball” speaking about his grandfather’s death, two of which interrupt the flow, but the last of which was a helpful exposition.
The Development and Us are reminiscent of the recent well-reviewed An Exclusive Love: A Memoir by Johanna Adorjan, about the author’s grandparents, who chose to die in a joint suicide when one became terminally ill. Adorjan explores what motivated her grandparents, progenitors of a loving family, with many friends and a dog, to kill themselves. What is the best way to go, all three authors ask. It’s an excellent question, one that bears as much discussion in literature as the best way to start out.
