Review: Dear Everybody

We’re late to the party. We’re very aware. We’ve got stacks of books we’ve been meaning to get to, and often reading those stacks results in the need to acquire subsequent stacks. Books are a vicious web of aesthetic agony in that regard, and the contemplation of any future wherein every book we’ve ever wanted to read has been read seems ridiculously optimistic at best.

Also, we’re a bit against the bandwagon. Tell us something is great, and we’ll tell you, “We’ll be the judge of that.” This is a bi-product of what we fear is an overly-fragile publishing industry. Quick, go and find us 10 negative book reviews. It’s a hard task. The scene is too small to throw stones. No one wants to offend.

So, when we heard about Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody we put it on our list. We ordered it from a bookseller. It gazed sweetly upon our reading chair post-arrival. We knew we’d eventually pick it up. And we were damned pleased when we did.

Listen, Kimball is all over the web. He’s part of the legitimate new wave which has embraced technology. He needs no introduction. We all know he’s a renaissance man. He writes books, he makes movies, he’ll put your soul onto a postcard, and there are alternate versions of him–or so we’ve been told.

Perhaps it is this multi-faceted background which has enabled Kimball to pen such a unique book. It’s a kind of a conglomeration. Part epistolary, part diary, part year book mash up, part mix-tape play list, part job application, part eulogy. The book, as you’ve most likely heard by now, is a collection of suicide notes from now-deceased weatherman Jonathon Bender to most every person or image he can conjure to memory in his carbon-monoxide poisoned state. These letters are orchestrated by year, gathered by Bender’s brother Robert, and placed alongside other pertinent documents in order to compile some form of biography about the overly-depressed departed.

And each moment of it is magical.

We cannot think of any book off hand that makes better use of the short form. Because Dear Everybody is nothing if it is not a collection. What? You say. The cover calls it a novel. Pipe down. It is a novel. It’s a novel of linked flash fiction.

Most every entry in Everybody could be tattooed on the ass of an infant. We do not recommend doing such, but, if so inclined, and if you had a tattoo gun and a whole mess of infant asses, you could most likely transcribe this book, piece by piece, on gentle new-born keisters.

The longest entry in the novel is a three and one-eighths page patient evaluation, an psycho analysis of a fifteen-year-old Bender. Here’s a portion.

Initial Interview

I asked Patient J why he thought he was here. Patient J believes that it is because of trouble at school or maybe because his family doctor sent him. He is not sure. Patient J reports that he has been feeling sad and that he has had “a lump in his stomach for months.” He says that the feeling began “after school started” and that “sometimes it feels as if an invisible man is squeezing his chest so hard that he can’t breathe.”

Dear Everybody follows Benders life from conception to suicide, and his existence is marred with depression and awkwardness. Aside from a brief run in high school as something of socialite, he is often seen as a pariah. Much of this stifled social success is blamed on the fact that Bender was raised in an abusive household. His traveling-businessman father was simultaneously negligent and violent, and his mother was stilted in the wake of his aggressions and absences.

But Kimball is remarkably able to carry us through these 230+ pages in the grasp of tender tongs. Using smooth rhythms, polished tones and humorous observations, Kimball gives us a monster of a family that somehow the reader needs to know.

Dear Dad,

I still have a lot of questions for you. Why did you always walk around the house in the morning with just your underwear on? Why were you always scratching yourself and making that horrible noise that made all of us turn away from you? And why did you always leave the bathroom door open when you sat on the toilet? Was it because you had been living by yourself in hotel rooms and had stopped closing the bathroom door? Or were you trying to show me something about yourself?

Dear Dad,

I didn’t lose control of your car on a patch of ice like I said. I got into that accident that dented the back fender on purpose. The only thing that I’m sorry about is that I drove back home and told you what happened. I should have just driven away from the accident and away from home and never come back. I Knew what you were going to do to me when you asked about your car before you asked about me. Anyway, I wasn’t hurt by the accident until you picked me up and threw me up against the living room wall. I still get headaches there at the back of my head where it put a dent into the drywall.

But some of the most heart wrenching moments in the novel come, not from the letters of Bender himself, but from the diary of Alice, Bender’s mother.

From the Diary of Alice Bender

November 29, 1970

I couldn’t get Jonathon to take a bath today. I put some bubble bath into the bathwater to make it fore fun for him, but he was terrified. Jonathon ran out of the bathroom screaming. I found him under his bed. I pulled him out and calmed him down and asked him what was wrong. He told me the bubbles in the bathtub meant the water was boiling. He was afraid I was going to cook him.

In less capable hands the construction of this novel may have resulted in a choppy check list. Kimball takes us from birth to suicide in a fairly standard stride. That is to say, we get the elements one might expect to see in any highly depressed individual. All the ingredients are there. Abusive family, social awkwardness, unsuccessful career, and failed marriage. But the details along the way, and the explicit humanity rendered throughout, make Dear Everybody a truly great read. That Kimball is able to polish each element–each entry–in the collection to a high sheen evidences a talent not often seen.

This is a book for lovers of both flash fiction and novels to marvel over, and we highly recommend adding it to your list. –Brian Allen Carr

Update From HTML Giant: 

This Thursday April 29, at 9 PM Eastern, Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and more, will read live here at HTMLGIANT from his home in Baltimore. Special guest appearance by Andy Devine, author of the newly released Words. Mark your book and bring your good hat.