Customer Reviews

Something Rising (Light and Swift): A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Haven Kimmel's 2 previous books were so disparate as to defy a reader's belief that the same woman could possibly have written both of them. Now, with Something Rising, we have the missing link: the Indiana setting we learned about in A Girl Named Zippy combined with a tough and conflicted protagonist like the girl/woman in The Solace of Leaving Early.
Cassie (short for Cassiopeia, not for Cassandra) Claiborne's coming of age process from a schoolgirl thru her teenage years and into sort-of-mature womanhood is chronicled within these pages. We see her struggling with a love/hate relationship with a mostly-absent but charismatic pool-playing ace of a father; interacting with a trapped, bitter, and disappointed mother who `could have married a rich man in New Orleans' but was already pregnant with Cassie; and coming to terms with a brilliant, odd, agoraphobic older sister. Cassie develops a tough shell as she becomes the supporter of her odd little family by working odd jobs but mostly by playing pool at Uncle Bud's bar and pool hall, but her fondest wish is to have a life of her own.
I found myself riveted by this book, pulling for Cassie's redemption as she set out to slay dragons in her mother's and sister's name. Only two things detracted from my enjoyment: the ending came a little too swiftly and was a little too neatly tied together, and, maybe it's me, but I just really, really didn't understand why she felt it necessary to whup (at pool, of course) the man her mother had been engaged to when the man who done her wrong came along. I mean, what did Cassie have against Jackson LaFollette, huh?

I dearly loved Haven Kimmel's first novel, "The Solace of Leaving Early". It was one of those books whose ending was so utterly satisfying on so many levels, I felt lighthearted for the rest of the day after I finished it (having read until the small hours of the morning.) "That," I kept saying to myself, "was a darned good book."

So I was watching and waiting for "Something Rising (Light and Swift," ready to fall in love (or hate) with a whole new cast of characters. And so I read it, finished it, and closed the cover feeling puzzled and morose and saying, "Yes, but...."

I just didn't like it very much. There was an underlying scornfulness, a mocking of people, that I found unattractive, considering Kimmel's smartness and sweetness and gentle prodding humor when describing the weirdness of small midwestern Bible Belt towns in "Solace". One got the feeling that she was giggling slightly at her own solid midwestern core that has been covered over with the shiny veneer of being a Published Author.

But in "Something Rising," I just didn't get that sense. It's a bit hard to define. There was an edge -- and I presume Kimmel meant it to be there -- of razor-sharp ugliness about it. No tenderness. No healing. No comfort. Just desolation and despair.

It didn't make for a happy read. It probably wasn't supposed to. But I really hate the feeling of being left with a partially unresolved plot.

And I wish someone would explain to me the significance of the title. The esoteric meaning has apparently flown right over my thick-as-a-stump midwestern head.

This was one of the very few books that I was not able to finish. Not because it's awful, or poorly written...actually, I thought it was written quite well, which is why I'm giving it 3 stars. Its just that I didn't get it. After getting more than halfway through this book I realized...I didn't care about any one of the characters, I didn't care what happened to them, didn't fully understand who they were, nothing at all. I skimmed the last 1/3 of the book just to see if it would get a little more exciting...it never did.

Cassie was likeable enough, but I found her to be to hard and empty, and her sister Belle obviously had some serious problems, but what they were I couldn't tell you. And Puck and Emmy...what a bizzare pair. What it comes down to is this book just wasn't for me. The reading is extremely choppy, and difficult to follow in some places. What I got wasn't quite what I expected when I started reading. It's not that I don't recommend the book, I personally didn't take to it, but I really like Haven Kimmel, and have high hopes for the next book of hers I pick up.

Compared to Kimmel's brilliant first novel,"Solace..." this reads like a labored Writing Class assignment: "Write a piece about a woman pool hustler, and make her an angry, masculine, drywaller whose redneck mother alludes to Kundera, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Martin Amis in the space of 2 pages."
Kimmel has a thing about frustrated intellectual housewives (the mothers, Laura, here and Annalee in "Solace...") who never went to college yet worship at the alter of Thought and Literature. Usually one kid goes to Bloomington to become a neurotic pointy-head while the other makes meth in the barn or practices tire-iron road rage while Seeking The Absent Father. Throw in some depth psychology and pages of pointless and unbelievable STRIFE, and you eventually get to the end of the exercise.
The pasted-on New Orleans Good Ending is OK only because we can hope that Hurricane Katrina has wiped out Haven's fictional Pool Hall Heaven paid for by deus ex machina. By the way, Cassie, the lumpy heroine whose outlawry consists of having uninteresting pot-smoking friends and never paying income tax, supposedly inherits a $300G stock and insurance settlement and the lawyer hands it over in cash and takes out no taxes?
Haven needs to have people who aren't in awe of her to read the drafts of her future novels. She is way too talented to wing it just because she had a great first novel. She needs better advisors/editors.

It's been a long time since I've read a book as good as Something Rising. What strikes me as immediately pleasant and refreshing is the fact that it has a timeless quality - the small towns, the simple lives, the beauty of a good story well told. There are no ambitious husband-seeking female characters, no thinly veiled and politically correct "messages", no references to designer clothing or celebrities. Her simple style is reminiscent of Willa Cather, yet the bursts of the human comedy and the unique yet 'ordinary people' characters remind me of how Pat Conroy hooks in a reader. Yet Kimmel's voiceis her own and it shines with an elegant subtlety, her dialogue is flawless. Characetsr liek BuenaVisa and Puck and Belle keep this book firmly on the sacred groundof Truth. Laura has many of the best lines and the kind of elder wisdom that is rarely seen in today's novels. It is simply and extraordinary book and I hope it gets the recognition it so richly deserves.

For a book about hustling pool, this book contains an awful lot of discussion about the role of feminine mythology in literature. This book felt less like a story than a justification of the tuition money spent on a Lit degree.

Not only is there the bizare out-of-place discussions about the protagonist's sister's college dissertation, but the book is chock-full of ham-fisted literary devices. I actually laughed out loud when Cassie won her father's prized pool que in a bet. Gee, what could that possibly be a metaphor for?

Early in the story, Cassie is instructed to study geometry and physics textbooks in order to understand pool. This made me wonder whether the author had ever seen a pool table or a geometry textbook. Most pool sharks don't need to know how to calculate the area of a tetrahedron. The amount of geometery that one must know to play pool well could probably be written in large letters on one side of a 3x5 index card.

The characters are dull and one-dimensional. Everybody dutifully plays their part without acting like an acutal person. We are treated to road-worn cliche characters such as the gay best friend, the absentee father, and the kindly grandfather. Cassie, the protagonist, is cold and unlikeable. She's like a Holden Caufield without the charm. I found myself wanting bad things to happen to her.

I suspect that my assignment was to analogize the Cassie character to some mythological godess that the author discussed. But it just wasn't worth the effort.

Her first book Zippy was a Today Show pick, but it is this novel which shines brightest in what is sure to be a long and brilliant career. Something Rising is studded with the kind of characters that seem to emerge whole from the pages: Puck, Jimmy, and of course Cassie are so real one feels they could touch them -- and we in the reading are surely touched. Cassie's redemption is a fierce will and the gift her father passed along: pool (billiards to the brits). The story is so compelling and funny and sad that it briskly engulfs the reader in a tide of lyrical bliss. Laura's speech about the Holiness of Love is surely one of the finest to ever grace my eyes. The novel is a mystery as well, careening through some agile plots twists until its grand finale. Brilliant, absorbing, tender, and uniquely satisfying, Ms. Kimmel has triumphed again.

The books that I've read by Haven Kimmel run the gamut between laugh out loud funny, break your heart poignant and I loved this book but I'm not 100% why. "Something Rising (Light and Swift)" was yet another different kind of book. It was beautiful in a brittle, heartbreaking way.

Cassie, the main character, is a girl, then a woman who is desperately and silently trying to hang on to those small and uncommon types of love that she has. Jimmy - her father, Laura - her mother, and Belle - her sister, give her very little love or affection in the traditional sense of the words. "Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away."

She desperately loves her father despite being abandoned by him for much of her life. Her mother's physical presence is a constant, yet Cassie knows very little about her. All through her life, it seems she is waiting for her father, so like her in spirit, to be part of her life, and for her mother, so unlike her, to tell her about her life.

Finally, once their lives start to change dramatically, Cassie gets part of what she wants as she starts to learn about the mystery that is her mother, Laura.

"...when you were three and Belle was five, I decided to leave your father, and Shirley was the first person I went to." Cassie rubbed her forehead. How could she ever explain to Laura that hearing this story still caused a shimmer in her belly, she was still afraid that Jimmy and she'd lose her family so long after he'd left and she'd lost?"

Cassie's feeling about her family - mother, father and sister are so conflicted, and so precisely written that she is one of the most real and knowable characters that I've read about in a long while.

"Cassie's breath quickened, and she could hear her heartbeat. Jimmy still evoked elation and dread - she wanted to run to him before he got away, and she wanted to run past him and have it over with."

She says very little throughout the book, but she feels so much - the reader is given a chance to know her more than she probably knows herself. Some of the choices she makes evoked a sense of protection in me...as if she was taking the first steps towards the paths of her parents and I wanted to warn her off. There was ferocity to Cassie that made me both fear for her and admire her.

I will always look forward to Haven Kimmel's books - I won't know what type of book to expect but I am sure it will be an amazing experience.

(...but she's a better writer than she is a storyteller at this point in her career.)

This is my third Haven Kimmel novel in a row. (Next up, 'The Used World'.) It's been a wonderful experience so far...if uneven.

There are consistent themes in her books. Hyper-intelligence (not so much an issue this time 'round, mostly peppered from her mother, then towards the end), The Lost Male (here a father, not a brother), and a displaced/fragmented/dysfunctional female lead (in this instance, probably the least investigated of the three I've encountered so far.)

And once again, there's Ms Kimmel's approach to telling a story...or to 'storytelling'. Which, as a writer, I can't take issue with; each of us has the right to tell our tales as we see fit. But as a reader, I alway reserve the right to feedback to the 'chef'.

''Something Rising' was at a steady velocity heading towards 'Messville'. It would have been a charming mess, but a mess nonetheless. Not much hung together. (Which is why I've rated it as I have.) But then...

...then she actually takes up the cause of telling the story, and things get so much more enjoyable, so much less obtuse (never mind abstruse), once she finally decides to let all the stark, anti-storytelling stuff go.

The funny thing is that this is the second novel in a row for me (the first being her début) where she suddenly races towards an actual ending for the tale, ignoring the fact that a ton has been ignored, denied, or otherwise forgotten in the effort. It's maddening in a way, but really, comes down to her clearly being willful, wanting to buck expecations (I would expect no less from someone with so enormous a brain...and talent), and so I can forgive her. However, I'd pay to see her in another mode, in 'full storytelling garb' to the tune of a densely-rendered 400-page tale. But that's just me.

I can't say as a writer that I'd have wanted my name on this one, but I'm glad she wrote it, glad I read it. In the end.

(Oh, and the unexpected tie-in was delicious!)

Personal rating: 7/10

Ok, well, I liked this book. It's just that I really wanted to LOVE this book, because the writing is beautiful and the author comes with such rich acclaim. But I felt I was kept at arm's length from the heart of this book, like I should have been content being just a spectator when I really wanted to be a participant.

The main character of this novel is Cassie Clairborne, who I suppose (to the casual observer) could be called a pool hustler. I love how she explains herself, though: "`I play American pool, not English billiards, and I'm not a shark. That would be a person who pretended not to be a good player, then stole the money of her opponent. I just announce myself, I say I've come to a place to play their best, and for money, and that person is called. Or I wait for him.'[...] `And do they, would they beat you?' `No,' Cassie said. `No, they wouldn't.'" The novel follows her "coming of age" in rural Indiana.

I love Cassie Clairborne, that much I can say without hesitation. She is complicated, so tough, so tender. Your heart breaks for her. I thought there would be many more poolhall scenes, but the fact that she plays pool is really just a consequence of her life experience, not the center of it. Pool is how she processes all of the pain and hurt and confusion she feels from the rest of her world.

I also love Kimmel's writing style, which is at times very lyrical. The pace of the plot, though, was what killed it for me. I joked with my husband that this book - even at a mere 269 pages - is a "skimmer's paradise," meaning that you could skim several large passage (even pages!) and jump back in with the plot having only moved forward just a skoche. I think I missed a lot of Kimmel's literary flourishes, but I could not convince myself to digest every single word.

Still, there is a different air to this book, and it is redeemed in the end by a handful of giant leaps in the storyline. I ended satisfied, if not completely enthusiastic.