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