THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY
by Michael Kimball
(Four Walls Eight Windows) $12.95

All of the loss of life is packed into the cadence of a child’s voice in Michael
Kimball’s novel The Way the Family Got Away. To a child, things represent
occurrences and emotion in a palpable way, like a heartbeat represents life,
and in Kimball’s novel things keep being traded away, in a litany that echoes
Tim O’Brien’s classic, The Things They Carried: “My brother’s cradle
and other baby stuff got us from Mineola to Birthrock. My mother’s necklaces
and other dress-up stuff got us from Birthrock to Stringtown. This girl there
got my sister’s doll people along with all the other things that went with her
practice family. They told my sister she wasn’t going to need her dollhouse
and the doll people living in it anymore since we weren’t living in our house
anymore.”

The gypsy narrators, alternating between the girl-child and boy-child, refer
to their car as the house-car, and their family as their people-family. This
distinction between the real and transient drives The Way along with
its cadence, a beaded necklace that breaks and scatters across America. In the
end, things are spread to the very corners of earth, where angels hold up the
edges. Kimball has created a short novel with long echoes, an epitaph of economics.
TRACI VOGEL

HUNGRY FOR THE WORLD
by Kim Barnes
(Villard Books) $23

There may be only two justifications for publishing a memoir: (1) You are Eleanor
Roosevelt; (2) you are a writer crafting a narrative from material that is very
close at hand. Hungry for the World takes up where Kim Barnes’ first
book, In the Wilderness–the story of her childhood among tongues-speaking
Pentecostal Idaho loggers–left off (although not without a 77-page summary
of the first book). Now she is 18 years old and working as a bank teller in
Lewiston, Idaho. It’s the late ’70s, and she grabs the first good time to come
along–a truck-driving, drug-addled, self-described rapist with a taste for
guns and the senseless slaughter of small animals. Soon Ms. Barnes is wearing
slinky outfits and having sex with other truckers who have been hand-picked
by her new beau.

But her tale never satisfies its own appetite. No world shows up. The problem
is not the material–lovely books have been built with far less: Think of Henry
Thoreau planting beans. Instead, Ms. Barnes seems to think the material speaks
for itself. She offers scant emotional detail and less context. She makes no
generalizations. When the book is done, we understand nothing but the fact that
Ms. Barnes had to endure a bit of agony to produce it. Cold as it may seem,
there must be more to a coming-of-age story than the author’s own need to write
it. MONTE MERRICK

LOST AND FOUND

EUROPEAN AUTHORS: 1000-1900
edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Vineta Colby
(H. W. Wilson, 1967) out of print.

In 1967, a year of riots and Rolling Stone, Stanley J. Kunitz and Vineta
Colby bucked the times with a 1,000-page counterrevolutionary tract: European
Authors: 1000-1900, a biographical encyclopedia I dragged out of a slouching
heap of decommissioned library books a while back. It’s a book that belongs
in the reference section of every Lost and Found library (between the Soviet
Encyclopedia and the 1973-74 American Basketball Association Media Guide),
to represent the nearly Lost and rarely Found whose lives it sketches: the 12th-century
bards, 14th-century mystics, 16th-century courtiers, and 19th-century revolutionaries
whose writings are destined for the auxiliary stacks of the new universal data
bank.

Browsing through the profiles, I find myself drawn to any signs of anguish
or failure, searching for hints of torment the way you might page through Fear
of Flying looking for words like “arched” and “mouth.” I bypass the unassailable
Goethes and Molières in favor of the poet Graf von Platen-Hallermünde
(1796-1835), who spent his last years “in a restless, wandering existence, filled
with loneliness, pessimism, and bitterness at his lack of recognition.” Or the
unlucky Jean Chapelain (1595-1674), who after more than 25 years of labor finally
produced the first 12 cantos of his epic of Joan of Arc, “an egregious poem
which even his most charitable friends could only describe as ‘beautiful but
excessively tiresome.'” Somehow, these grand but obscure failures are a comfort
to me. This is a book that takes the long view, the sort of Olympian perspective
that makes 1900 seem as strange and ancient as 1000, and 1000 as present as
1900. Only with such patience–the patience of the builders of the Great Wall
of China–could you placidly remark about the Spanish poet Rosalìa de Castro
(1837-1885), as one of the contributors does, “It is only in fairly recent years
that Rosalìa has come into her own,” as if this woman, rotting in her grave
for nearly a century, had only just now cast aside the blushes of youth. TOM
NISSLEY