Breathing Out the Ghost [Hardcover]

Kirk Curnutt (Author), Jim Gilbert (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: River City Publishing; 1st edition (February 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579660703
• ISBN-13: 978-1579660703
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,423,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kirk Curnutt's first novel, Breathing Out the Ghost, was named Best Fiction in the Indiana Center for the Book's 2008 Best Books of Indiana Competition. It also won a bronze IPPY from the Independent Publishers Association and was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards. Among his other eleven books are the thriller Dixie Noir (2009; also a ForeWord finalist); Coffee with Hemingway (2007), an entry in Duncan Baird's series of imaginary conversations with great historical figures; and the story collection, Baby, Let's Make a Baby (2003). Forthcoming in late 2011 is Icons of Pop: Brian Wilson, a study of the Beach Boys mastermind from Equinox/Indiana University Press. The winner of the gold medal in nonfiction writing in the 2008 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition sponsored by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, Curnutt was previously awarded three consecutive Hackney Awards for short-story writing (2004-2006) and is past finalist for the Peter Taylor Prize/Tennessee Book Award. A passionate devotee of all things F. Scott Fitzgerald, he is vice-president of the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, managing editor of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and a board member of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery. His website is www.kirkcurnutt.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathing Out the Ghost, July 6, 2008

By 

Erik L. Simon (Nyack, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breathing Out the Ghost (Hardcover)

This is an unbelievable novel--profound, painful, unflinching, frank, moving, disturbing, wise. It takes on an enormously difficult subject--children, the worst that can happen to children, or the loss of children through death, murder, disappearance--and it offers no easy answers, no painless endings, no trenchant beliefs. Let me correct myself. Faulkner once said that he distrusted ideas, that stories were borne of characters, and I think he's right. And Curnutt is far too capable a writer to submit to ideas for fiction, so actually, this book doesn't take on an enormously difficult subject; rather, it takes on enormously pained and complex characters--one intelligent man whose son has been missing for a year, one wise farmer's wife whose daughter was murdered years ago, a pedophile, a private eye who got emotionally and inextricably bound in the first character's Ahab-like pursuit of his son--it takes these characters, has them stumble together, and it plays itself out. Beautifully. Painfully. Intelligently. Here are the things I like most about this book:

It doesn't psycholgize. Isaac Singer, in the introduction to his collection of stories, warns against writers using psychology, and not enough writers have heeded the warnings. (Please no more revalations on an analyst's chair, as if such worthy revalations are even possible there. Please expunge the word "dysfunctional" from our society. Please. I digress.) Curnutt doesn't psychologize. He doesn't try to explain why these people are doing what they're doing, why they are who they are, even the pedophile. He just lets them all do it, and he passes no judgment.

It tells the story from multiple points of view. I love a book that does that. I love a book that bounces from character to character and creates a tapestry of so many different yet definitive and interconnected threads.

I love its rendering of the Midwest. There's that paragraph in Gatsby wherein Nick says, "That was my Middle West," and then goes on about the old houses and all that. Well, those days are gone. The Middle West is now about farmers who combine in air-conditioned tractors, families who prefer canned vegetables to anything in a garden, etc. That's a generalization, of course, but that duality is the Middle West I grew up in, one in which there is a clash between the modern and, as Curnutt writes, "a time that grew more remote with each passing season." And yet, just as soon as one character leaves a Wal-Mart, another character is out castrating pigs (which I've done) or cutting the tails off of newborn piglets (which I've done). Curnutt captures this dichotomy of the Midwest more accurately than anyone else I've read.

He also captures the people well. The wittiest people I have ever known were those farmers back home. They're funny sons of guns, as are the women. Curnutt knows this.

The writing. I love the writing. When Curnutt needs to move the plot along, he does so with long sentences (my favorite kind; size matters) and clear prose; and when he doesn't feel a pressing need to move the plot along, he luxuriates in extraordinary prose. Wish more writers did.

This is a superb novel. It won't cheer you up, but I'm tired of that being held as a standard. It was Kafka who said fiction needs to be the pickaxe to break the frozen seas of our inner selves, or something like that. And for those who prefer their fiction to act as therapy, there won't be anyone you can relate to, but it was Eudora Welty who said that the great thing about fiction is that it compels us to see the world through someone else's eyes. The characters in this book are indelible. The stories--heartbreaking. This book is the real thing

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A painful and beautiful read, February 8, 2009

By 

Valorie T. "Morbid Romantic" (VA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breathing Out the Ghost (Hardcover)

Colin St. Claire lost his son. Kidnapped. There was no resolution for him because there was never a body found. All St. Claire had was a suspect and the ghost of his son. Following his `whale,' St. Claire goes off on a speed fueled mission to find his son and punish the man he thinks did it. Following him is an ex-detective named Heim who can't seem to let St. Claire go just as much as St. Claire can`t let go of his son. Sacrificing his own family and his own career, Heim is determined to save St. Claire even if St. Claire won't save himself. Mixed into this is a woman they both come to know, a woman named Sis Pruitt- paths crossing and connecting by the experience of pure and plain suffering- who too lost her daughter Patty when she was murdered. The subject matter isn't something that can be shaken away or read with a light heart.

Curnutt's masterful use of description and language is almost poetic. Yet, instead of beautifying the story and masking the horror of what has happened, it only illuminates the darker context under which every one and everything moves and works. Time and time again I caught myself rereading passages, sometimes just because I like how they sounded and sometimes because I wanted to absorb the words into myself. I wanted to understand what was being said and try to feel every bit of it because it was so plainly written. Underneath the prose is something so harshly true to life that it sinks into you. You realize as you read it, "this is really how we are and think." Only, we don't often delve that deeply into our nature to find out.

Breathing Out the Ghost tells us how people cope. Or rather, how unrealistic an expectation it is for us to expect people to move on after tragedy, as well as how people function and react in unique ways. It's about pain and obsession and destruction and failed attempts at redemption. This book exposes how we think and feel about tragedy, both those who experience it and those who witness it as outsiders. I came to see through reading this book that we all are more comfortable assuming that life goes on. Yet, the truth of the matter is that it's not so easy. Time and time again I found myself frustrated with St. Claire. He was selfish to think that his quest was not hurting anyone or that his pain was larger than other people. But isn't it also selfish for people to assume that he should let go and move on? Who was I to judge him? It was all very painful to be a part of, but not in a way that made me want to close the book and avoid picking it back up.

This book offers absolutely no resolution. I don't say that to criticize. At the end of the book, no one has found peace. Curnutt doesn't try to create drama so that he can fix it and leave his readers with a warm and fulfilled feeling at the end. The drama is the story itself and reflects the hard truth of reality: sometimes there is no end, there is no peace, there is no happiness or light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes all that there is at the end is just more wandering and wondering, tediously carrying forward for each day.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Breathing out the Ghosts, January 11, 2009

By 

S. Agusto-Cox "Savvy Verse & Wit" (Germantown, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breathing Out the Ghost (Hardcover)

How would you react if you lost a child? What is the appropriate reaction for a parent who has lost a child? These are the questions tackled in Breathing Out the Ghost. Moving on after a child has disappeared or murdered is unimaginable, but life does move on; but how it moves on is up to the family impacted by these tragedies.

"From inside the cab of the combine, Pete watched the reels of the header bat down row after row of soybeans. As the stalks fell backwards, their stems snipped clean by a line of saw teeth on the header's bottom cutter bar, the bean pods scratched against the metal of the machinery, making the sound of a whisking broom on carpet." (page 244)

This passage signifies how both Sis and Pete Pruitt and Colin and Kimm St. Claire tackle their grief and pick up the remnants of their lives. The process of rebuilding is a series of fits and starts and restarts; it's not pretty and it's never complete. Like the stalks cut down in this passage, lives are halted and lives are skinned raw. While Sis and Pete continue with their lives as best as possible and become a source of selfless comfort for others hit by tragedy in their town, Kimm is left to her own devices when her husband Colin, who calls himself a modern Ahab of the highway, sets out on a journey to find their lost son, A.J. Both stories are separate and connected, but only begin to intersect when St. Claire finds Sis Pruitt at a local fair where she and her group, Parents of Murdered Children, share their photo quilt.

Each of these characters expresses their loss in different ways, but it is more than loss that permeates the pages of this novel. The inability to control life is most evident in St. Claire's actions, but it peeks out from behind Sis' veil of normalcy as well. When Sis works with her community members to provide food for volunteers searching for a lost boy, she loses herself in the kitchen conversation, almost fooling herself into believing she's normal. It's only when she expresses herself and her memories of her dead daughter, Patty, that she realizes normalcy is not hers.

Curnutt's masterful language and description in this novel paints a vivid Midwest landscape in which these characters languish in their grief and flourish in spite of that grief. From Michigan to Indiana, readers will picture the asphalt highway that becomes St. Claire's home, office, and escape and the Pruitt's farm that provides them with order in a town where they feel they have been branded by the murder of their daughter.

One of the best passages in this book is found on page 219, where St. Claire is recording his thoughts on cassette tape for his lost son:

"When I see myself I don't see anything organic, anything original. I steal my aphorisms from outside sources. My actions pantomime the exploits of others. I'm all imitation, a gloss of a citation. Somewhere along the line I began compiling myself from the excerpts of better men."

Many of these characters are looking for ways to fill the holes inside them left by loss. And this novel is not just about the loss of loved ones; it is a novel about losing oneself in that loss, allowing it to swallow you whole. The introduction of Sis' grandmother, Ethel, who has dementia, is a nice addition to the cast. Not only has she experienced the loss of loved ones, but also her own memories and sense of self. However, she is less tortured by that loss, as she is not bound by time lines or turning points that she would like to have a chance to do over. Regret and a lack of control over life can sometimes be more powerful than actual loss. While there are some graphic details involving sexual predator Dickie-Bird, St. Claire's mythical white whale, this novel is an insightful look at grief, family, and perseverance.