SOMETHING RISING (LIGHT AND SWIFT) - Haven Kimmel

(Part 1 of 2)

I wanted this book to never end.  I read it slowly, in small bites, savoring each word. Even so,  I finished it this morning, and laid it down with a thump of satisfaction.  This writer has two other books, a memoir with the unlikely title of A Girl Called Zippy, and another novel, The Solace of Leaving Early.  They are now both on my request list at the library.  I can't remember when I was so affected by the writing in a novel, by the simple act of following  words as they unreeled through sentences and paragraphs.  This is some kind of amazing writing, beautiful, quirky, radiant, deep and true.  Jacket copy is jacket copy, but there's a quote on the back cover from one of my favorite novelists, Elizabeth Berg, that says it just right: "What intelligence is here, and what grace, and what unsentimental (and contagious!) love for our messy ways here on planet Earth.  Haven Kimmel is true gospel wearing blue jeans:  you read her and you are lifted up." 

A fast summary from ReviewsofBooks.com:  "Cassie Claiborne, the protagonist of Something Rising, is the daughter of a New Orleans woman who chased a pool shark all the way to Indiana, and then stayed there while he abandoned the family. Cassie has inherited his skill with a cue and finds pool halls to be an escape from the troubled lives around her. Her world is populated by uncaring parents and friends who have no aim in life. As she matures, her mother's death brings an opportunity to go to New Orleans, and try to find the man who her mother should have married."

And I guess that's sort of it, in a tiny nutshell, but it leaves out Cassie's relationships with her mother, Laura, and  her sister, Belle; two characters of enormous importance, to the book and to Cassie.  Laura is anything but "uncaring," as the letter she leaves for her daughters to read after her death makes clear.  The letter is a brilliant piece; through it we, and her daughters, know more of Laura than any amount of description or narration could have revealed.

(Continues in Part 2)