Customer Reviews

The Used World: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Once in a while you read a book that's so multi-layered and absorbing, you just don't want to let it go when it's finished. "The Used World" is one of those books. Other reviewers have said that they finished this book and started straight over again at the beginning, and I can see why: you have the feeling that it's so full of riches, you haven't done it justice with one read.

"The Used World" follows the threads of three women's stories and binds them together into an unexpected and unusual present. Everything you assume about love and family is shaken up and reinvented.

Hazel Hunnicutt, a woman in her sixties who lives alone with her cats, is the proprietor of the Used World Emporium, a warehouse-and-barn full of wares carrying the weight of the past. In flashbacks we learn of Hazel's love for her childhood friend Finney, a girl full of light and fun. The story of Finney's self-destructive love and its sad outcome are an undercurrent to Hazel's present.

Hazel's employees are Claudia and Rebekah. Claudia, forty years old and mourning the death of her mother, is a freakishly tall woman forever disenfranchised from the joys others take for granted.

The younger Rebekah is a refugee from a fundamentalist church, disowned by her family, pregnant by an immature young man who left her for a college girl.

Into this mix come a baby, a dog, a gentler church, some wild sisters, and the unbearable weight of past intentions and actions. Though the redemptive outcome of all these forces is never assured, ultimately there is the chance for more peace than these women have known in their troubled lives. They don't get there easily, but they do get there.

The story is simple but the structure complex, the writing magical. The characters, including the cast of supporting players, are so finely drawn that it took my breath away. About baby Oliver who had kicked his blanket over his head, Kimmel writes: "... Oliver had become so distressed he'd kicked his blanket up over his head. 'What a problem,' Claudia said, uncovering him and lifting him up, his little body still such a surprise in her hands. How could something so insubstantial bear within it Oliver's nature, his character, everything that would compel him into adulthood?"

These three women spent much of their lives on the outside looking in, an isolation Kimmel illustrates again and again with scenes that ring so true. About the young Hazel visiting her friend Finney's family on Christmas Day: "What a treasure they were, these people for whom cakes collapsed, sleepy, normal people who worked hard and loved their daughter, and knew how to take a holiday off and spend it. They SPENT Christmas Day, like a bonus check or a tax return, while at the sterile Hunnicutt Clinic shoes were always worn; sleeping was a private activity conducted only at night, in a bedroom; and everything was hoarded -- money and joy alike."

The dramas of this book, past and present, are woven together with the everyday business of living. If you invest the time to read "The Used World," you'll be rewarded with an unforgettable story, told with humbling beauty. Highly recommended.

Linda Bulger, 2008

I admit I have only read one other of Haven Kimmel's books, THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY, and I enjoyed that and thought it was well written with believable characters. Though THE USED WORLD has the same setting (apparently a fictionalized Muncie, Indiana and its surroundings) and Church of the Brethren minister Amos (and very peripherally his wife Langston) who are major characters in "SOLACE" also appear in this effort the books are quite different.

This book is filled with melodramatic, unbelievable plot lines, some borrowed from other sources, and characters who are either misunderstood, mistreated saints or the most awful caricatures of rural Midwesterners. In fact Kimmel writes with such utter contempt for those who shop at WalMart, eat at McDonalds and attend large fundamentalist churches that it was often difficult for me to continue reading. I will believe Kimmel has met and even known people from rural Indiana who commit these just mentioned transgressions but she seems to be unable to convey any empathy for or write about such individuals with any genuineness or respect for them as fellow humans.

Some portions of the book are well written enough but other segments are awkward and unclear and a little editing and rewriting would have been beneficial. A pet peeve of mine is how invisible rural working class Americans are in today's mass media. I do appreciate Ms Kimmel setting her book(s) among the ordinary folks of rural Indiana but I am disappointed by her inability to see beyond the usual stereotypes of residents of such areas at least in this novel.

"The Used World" is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. The key to enjoying Haven Kimmel's work is to let her stories take their time. Yes, this is difficult in these days of so much to do, not to mention the need for instant gratification! I was ready to give up on "The Solice of Leaving Early" about 50 pages into it because I couldn't figure out who was who and what was going on. However, I decided to stick with it, and it was well worth it. Both "The Used World" and "The Solice of Leaving Early" provide a payout to those take their time to savor these wonderful stories.

The many worlds of Haven Kimmel run together in this blindingly beautiful book about the friendship of women. I've read her books all many times, can't wait to read this one all over again to catch the nuances I missed the first time through. THanks Haven!

I finished this book and started it right over again. I didn't want to leave the characters. When I started the book I had thought that it was going slow and had too many characters but once I was involved with poor Beckah I had to find out what happens to her. Ms Kimmel has done it again. She is one of my favorite authors.

After reading both of Haven's memoirs, Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch I couldn't wait to read her novels. Now that I'm on the 3rd one I have to say reader beware. They are nothing like the memoirs even in writing style and are so jumbled up with confusing dialogue and jumping around in place and time that they really are not enjoyable reading. I wish she had a better editor who would know how to hold back her obviously huge imagination. Her mind might think so quickly there aren't pages enough to say it all but the average reader does not have that issue. I would say emphatically that less would be much much more.

I loved the female characters in this book and their relationships with each other, and I was glad to reconnect with Amos (from THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY). The more Haven Kimmel I read, the more I associate the word "redemptive" with her. Her characters have messy lives, but they manage to find their way, however imperfectly, to something fine, something good, something worth living for. It's true (as some reviewers have pointed out), that the story isn't completely linear and includes some digressions, but I like a book that keeps me on my toes.

Haven Kimmel has created an everytown in Jonah, Indiana. You feel its deep, rich history as you see it through the eyes of its three main characters. Hazel, the owner of The Used World Emporium, a secondhand store and her two employees, Rebekah, the young and dumped daughter of a cult member, and Claudia, the big, strong 40-ish misfit may be nothing like you, but you will still wish they were your friends.

On the surface, these women live simple, even boring lives in a mundane small town. But, as you read, you'll uncover layers of intrigue and you'll want to discover what makes them tick and how they will react to the challenges they face.

This book is anything but preachy, but you will totally feel Kimmel's seminary attendance in the thorough and compelling religious influence. Claudia and Rebekah both wrestle with questions of faith and church. Claudia's pastor, Amos, is another character you'll wish you knew. I'd buy him a cup of coffee, myself.

If you are looking to read something that gives you a glimpse behind the curtain of our public personas, read this book.

I deeply enjoyed "Zippy" and feel that "The Solace of Leaving Early" could possibly be one of my most beloved books, one to turn to again and again. "Something Rising" was a disappointment, leaving me wishing I'd been able to like it more. But the premise of "The Used World" seemed so sound and solid, I was prepared to like it very much before I even opened the cover.

There were a number of problems in this novel that left me dismayed and even offended; I was glad to finish it and I'll never read it again and I hope that Haven Kimmel will produce something better in future books.

If "Something Rising" had a hard edge to it (and I said so in my review of that book), then "Used World"'s edges were sharp and painful. Here are some examples:

There were four different characters in this book who were married women with children (Caroline, Millie, Kathy and Emmy), and all of them managed to do one of the following things:

1. Despise their husbands, or at least have a marriage that was jarringly wrong.

2. Have children who scorned them or were otherwise unsatisfactory

Two other characters, Ruth and Ludie, already dead at the beginning of book, were also married women. Ruth, Rebekah's mother, was the wife of the vicious Vernon. Ludie alone seemed to have had a happy marriage and produced one good daughter out of two.

It is broadly hinted that families headed by two lesbians or two gay men -- an "intact, employed, Christian family" -- would be stronger and maybe even preferable to the mess of the "tottering social structure." Which is, what? A bit skewed? A jejune assessment of men, women and children in whatever groups they sort themselves into? Because according to statistics, gay and lesbian couples with children split at the same rate as do heterosexual couples, right at about 50%. So how Kimmel has come by this notion that heterosexual couples + offspring = unhappy marriage and screwed up kids and that gay/lesbian couples + offspring = substance and meaning with everyone so well-adjusted, they couldn't topple off a narrow plank, I just don't know.

Then there's the manner in which Kimmel portrays conservative Protestant Christians: they're either crazy cultists getting washed in the blood of the Lamb in some arcane rite, or they're idiots who secretly try to have their own grandchildren aborted. Both types are stupid, mean, hypocritical, and apparently have no more than a nodding acquaintance with the Jesus they claim to have been saved by.

I grew up in the midwest, so I'm no stranger to both types of Christian Kimmel shows us. But listen, they're not ALL like that. All conservative people aren't brainless, anti-intellectual Palinites. And by the way, neither are all liberal thinkers invested with great and uncommon virtue. I can't believe Kimmel's editor let her get away with this, because it has really affected her writing, making it less true, less worthy. It shows a bias that a writer as talented as Kimmel should not permit herself. As an author, she comes off as petty, superficial and smug and I simply couldn't get past it in this book.

Kimmel has diminished herself by not exploring the fact that there are conservative Christians who are sincere and good (and maybe, I don't know, don't have a single decorative item in their homes emblazoned with Footprints or the Serenity Prayer or whatever...just a thought). When a writer focuses on any given group as being all good or all bad, she/he drastically limits the depths and levels of thought and meaning a beautiful novel can have.

And then there were the characters.

Hazel was a character I found difficult to like, but that's okay. Not every character necessarily has to be appealing, although I was really confused about her attempts to bring Claudia and Rebekah together. Rebekah had one man who'd done her wrong -- who hasn't? Does that automatically mean that a woman turns to lesbianism? I found this very strange. I mean, one can see Hazel's motivations in her match-making, but it struck a false note with me.

And then there was Amos. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the entire Summa Theologica, never penned such pearls of wisdom as fall from the lips of Amos Townsend. He grew on me in "The Solace of Leaving Early": by the end of the book, I felt I had a handle on his and Langston's personal neuroses and could love them despite their flaws. But Amos (who is admittedly a peripheral character in this book) hasn't grown at all, and you'd think that his marriage and the adoption of the two girls would have somehow made him more stalwart, but no.

No. Instead, we have the same old mushy and pretentious drivel leaking out of him...oh, it just drove me mad. Listen, Amos: Either profess the gospel of Christ or don't, and stop working out your angst regarding the "proof of the resurrection" on your congregation. He is, without Kimmel's intention, because you can tell she loves him, one of the most ponderously pedantic waffling bores in modern American fiction.

I loved Claudia and her determination to stand up beyond the pain of being too constantly in everyone's sight line and the pain of inner emptiness and get out of herself to do the right thing. She was a beautiful person. And Rebekah, too. Anyone who can shuck off the burden of an oppressive upbringing and do it with a grace that offers no bitter rejoinders or harsh blame is not a weak person, which is how she perceived herself, but a person of great inner strength and fineness.

It was for the two of them that I followed this book all the way through.

The first 80 pages are tough, which was expected. They are so detailed and contained so much information that I found myself reading them twice. After page 80 you will breeze through about 100 or so pages and then it slows down a bit in the sense so much happens you kind of go back to reading each page twice for a while. If you loved Solace of leaving early, you will also love this book. I LOVE the way she is not just subtle in the hints of a character from another book that may be related to this one like in Light ans swift and Solace. In the last book I feel in love the Amos Townsend's character and it has him alot in this book and even mentions the daughters for a moment. The characters in this new book are very unique and different and really interesting getting to know. I like the challange of Haven's novels. It's not an easy read but you get a great gift if you stick in there and finish the book! It was worth the wait.