Dear Everybody
Michael Kimball
September 2008
Josh Maday
Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody, is wonderfully subtitled “A Novel Written in the Form of Letters, Diary Entries, Encyclopedia Entries, Conversations with Various People, Notes Sent Home from Teachers, Newspaper Articles, Psychological Evaluations, Weather Reports, a Missing Person Flyer, a Eulogy, a Last Will and Testament, and Other Fragments, Which Taken Together Tell the Story of the Short Life of Jonathon Bender, Weatherman.” Kimball juxtaposes these fragments to cultivate a swirl of humor and sadness, giving the reader a palpable sense of Jonathon’s intense alienation and loneliness at the center of the increasingly unhappy Bender family.
Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody, is wonderfully subtitled “A Novel Written in the Form of Letters, Diary Entries, Encyclopedia Entries, Conversations with Various People, Notes Sent Home from Teachers, Newspaper Articles, Psychological Evaluations, Weather Reports, a Missing Person Flyer, a Eulogy, a Last Will and Testament, and Other Fragments, Which Taken Together Tell the Story of the Short Life of Jonathon Bender, Weatherman.” Kimball juxtaposes these fragments to cultivate a swirl of humor and sadness, giving the reader a palpable sense of Jonathon’s intense alienation and loneliness at the center of the increasingly unhappy Bender family.
The story of Jonathon’s life begins with his obituary, followed by his brother Robert’s editorial statement, where he admits that he never liked his brother, but that he never really knew him either, which is why he has gathered these scraps and fragments and asked people about Jonathon’s life. After “A Chronology of Jonathon Bender,” the main text begins with Jonathon’s first letter:
Dear Everybody,
Here I am sitting in my kitchen with everybody who I can remember and it is crowded in here. Everything that I can remember is falling out of my head, going down my arms, and out my fingers. I can feel it happening inside me and sometimes it hurts.
Even though the pieces are ordered chronologically, the telling of this story is anything but orderly and neat for Jonathon. Time is one overwhelming moment, as it is in the letter quoted above, where he sees nearly everyone who has passed through his life gathered all at once in his kitchen as he writes, and yet Jonathon’s experience is fractured and scattered and difficult to put together in a way that will fully explain things. And so Jonathon writes letters: “I’m going to write everybody letters about everything that happened. I always thought that my life had been continuous, but now I can’t remember anything except for isolated instances. I hope that these were my defining moments.”
Filling in the spaces around Jonathon’s letters are his mother’s diary entries and selections of Robert’s interview with their dad, which come together with the suicide letters to form a sort of cubist representation of Jonathon’s tragic existence. Although the story is often sad and ultimately tragic, Jonathon’s childlike way of looking at the world provides natural deposits of comic relief. The worst relationship for him was with his father, prompting Jonathon to ask him a few questions:
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? . . . Also, why did you tuck your shirts into your underwear when you got dressed to go to work? And why did you put so much cologne on that we could smell it even after you left the house to go to work? Was it so that we would smell it and think about you even when you weren’t there? I tucked my shirt in like that once and it made me feel as if I were dressed up as somebody else and that’s when I realized that I wasn’t ever going to take after you. . . I still remember those few times that we played catch together. I used to think that throwing the baseball back and forth somehow connected us. But now I realize that neither one of us held on to the baseball for very long. It was mostly just something that was in the air between us.
Kimball writes with such deep emotion and crafts his sentences with such mastery that he sweeps away his own footprints and allows the reader unhindered access to the story. The fragmented nature of the book makes it an addictive read, giving the reader regular breaks while at the same time drawing them along. I often found myself thinking, “Just one more letter. One more diary entry. One more interview,” until it was time to go back to the beginning and start over. With Dear Everybody, Michael Kimball achieves the perfect balance of form and content, comedy and tragedy – all without sliding into melodrama or sentimentality, instead evoking genuine emotion that will remain with readers far beyond the last page.