Book Review

Dear Everybody
by Michael Kimball
Alma Books, 2008
www.almabooks.co.uk.
ISBN-10: 1846880556

There are many good things that can be said about Michael Kimball's new novel, Dear Everybody, and many good things have been said already. What perhaps I can add to the conversation is an admission of weakness: I cried at its end. Kimball has created a complex and engaging character in his hero, Jonathon Bender, a man who is both trapped intractably inside his own head and a man who loves, and needs love from, the people around him so much that he comes to believe in the magic properties of his mind. Kimball has used the oddest assortment of documents–transcripts of conversations, diary entries from Jonathon's mother, the suicide letters of Jonathon himself–to document in detail this loneliness and love. To read the novel is an odd experience, and an entirely unique one. Most of all, though, somehow out of oddness, out of revelation of the strange and sick and miraculous manner of Jonathon's thoughts, Kimball has written a book of beauty. It's a sad book and a wonderful one, and one that made me cry.—Joseph Young