This issue marks InDigest’s, and Bedside Stacks’, first birthday, and nothing says birthday fun like reading about suicidal
businessmen on circuitous quests to understand why their loved ones have
rejected them. (I used to believe birthdays were to be celebrated with cupcakes
and party hats, but apparently I was wrong.) This month I managed to read two
novels with remarkably similar themes, both of which employ many of the same
playful, clever post-modern formal elements. These books have to do with
ditching your old life and setting off in search of the truth that most
intimidates you. Taking such a bold course of action will evidently either
result in misery or a miracle; it’s quite the gamble.
The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg is the first novel by Geoff Herbach, a founding member of the Lit 6 project. The Miracle Letters is the story of Theodore Rimberg’s march to the brink of death and his unlikely trip back from that precipice.
Thirty-five years old and recently divorced, T., as he is known, begins to
unravel when he receives a mysterious package from his estranged father. Armed
with an unexpected inheritance and a batch of letters dispatched from Antwerp,
T. sets out to find his lost father and to then kill himself. T. stumbles around Europe with Cranberry, a teenage runaway from St. Paul,
experiencing devastating visions of World War II and writing letters to anyone
he can think of: ex-girlfriends, TV characters, Bill Clinton, and Brett Favre, among others. I generally have an
allergy to epistolary novels, but Herbach strikes the proper balance between
making T.’s letters informative and informal. Interviews with Father Barry, a priest who
finds T.’s cache of journals and letters, allow T. a chance to directly confront his
experiences.
You only need to read a few of his letters to notice that T. is kind of an ass.
The suicide notes he compulsively pens demonstrate that he only thinks of other
people inasmuch as their stories illuminate his own. And the way T. grapples
with good and evil, God and free will, confession and absolution, remind me of
an eager college freshman getting high and telling all his friends what he’d just learned in Intro to Philosophy. But if he is sometimes too intense and
excitable, T. is also quite perceptive. Herbach endows him with the ability to
turn a sharp eye on his own moral failings and phobias, and to sort out those
faults through the act of writing. It is T.’s willingness to enact what he most fears – death, a father’s abandonment – that gives him the courage to continue living and the strength to become a
hero. Perhaps
The Miracle Letters tries to take on too many moral and philosophical issues, but it is nonetheless
a darkly funny, engaging book. And as the world continues to spiral out of
control, it is refreshing to read a literary novel that unabashedly speaks to
the power of faith and hope.
If faith and hope aren’t really your thing, perhaps you would prefer to read
Vacation, the first novel by Deb Olin Unferth (author of the short story collection Minor Robberies). Vacation follows a pathetic corporate cog named Myers as he follows a college
acquaintance named Gray in order to find out why his wife had been following
Gray around Manhattan right before their marriage imploded. See all the levels
of stalking and deceit at work there? But that’s not all: wound within Myers’ narrative is the quest of a girl named Claire to track down her biological
father, who just so happens to be a famous dolphin trainer turned dolphins’ rights activist. The stories intersect as Myers hunts Gray to a remote tropical
island where Claire’s dad is set to release one of his rescued dolphins back into the wild. Alas,
the showdown between Myers and Gray suffers some serious setbacks when it turns
out that one of them has completely lost his mind.
Unferth’s vivid writing propels the whole sordid mess along beautifully; the narration
swoops in and out of various characters’ minds, giving voice to even the most minor observer, before pulling back and
revealing tantalizing hints of the broader picture, only to dive-bomb back into
the heart of the action. If it sounds dizzying, that’s because it is. Unferth is a gifted writer, capable of deploying startling
insights at points perfectly calibrated to make the most impact. Such a bleak,
fatalistic story should not shimmer with such beauty, and yet that’s exactly what
Vacation does. In The Miracle Letters, T.’s efforts to make peace with history made him whole again, but poor Myers starts
off fairly stable and falls apart because he simply cannot stop fixating on
certain fragments of his past. The one bright spot in all of this is Claire,
who draws destiny and luck to her side because she has no preconceived notions
of what shape forgiveness should take. Vacation turns the world upside down, taking you to a place where the most beautiful
things are revealed to be distorted and deeply strange. It is not necessarily a
happy trip, but it is positively spellbinding.
