THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY - Part 1 of 3

 From the start I have to say: this is a hard one.  Kimmel herself gives away the essential nature of the story in this remark in the "Acknowledgments" at the end of the book: "My godmother... after listening to me bemoan the sad fact that I'd never write a doctoral dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and the nature of grief, said, 'You could always write it as a novel.'" 

And so, that's what she did.   I may not actually summarize the story,  just give you characters and impressions. The location is back in bleak small town Indiana, as with Something Rising.  A small town mostly peopled by broken lost souls and rednecks, though some of the characters have remarkable book collections on their shelves.

The characters:  Langston Braverman, who stalked out of her PhD orals at the university and is now back in her parents' home, installed in her girlhood attic room, enduring what the cover summary calls "her self-imposed existential dilemma." Langston is a woman of almost thirty who has spent her entire life in academia, returning to the haven of her parents, expecting to be both pampered and left to her own devices.