THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY - Softcover

Kimball, Michael

3.46

120 ratings by Goodreads

9780007292073: THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007292074 ISBN 13: 9780007292073

Publisher: HARPER COLLINS, 2008

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A remarkable first novel about a journey across America and the effects of grief and loss on a family that is trying to stay together when everything is falling apart. This is the way the family got away. They pack all the things they can fit into the car and place the body of their dead brother in the toy box and put him in the boot. They leave Mineola, Texas and head across the terrifying, vacant landscape of Mid-America. In every place they visit, they sell off what they can to make it to the next town. They keep going to keep the family together. Michael Kimball's remarkable The Way The Family Got Away is the story of the journey seen through the eyes of the family's surviving children, a young boy and his younger sister. They try to make sense of death; why they must leave home and how they get from one place to the next. It is an extraordinary study of the effects of grief upon language and the ways that loss makes itself felt through a child's imagination.

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About the Author:

In 1998 Michael Kimball received a grant from the prestigious New York Foundation of the Arts. He has published fiction in New Orleans Review, Story Quarterly and The Quarterly . He lives in Texas with his wife.

From Kirkus Reviews:

As the family car inches toward far-off Michigan, two children labor to make sense of their infant brothers death back in Texas. Once the baby, dead of an illness that brought high fever and indelible memories, was embalmed and placed inside a toy box in the trunk, the family packed their remaining belongings and headed for their grandfathers house half a continent away. The situation smacks of an updated As I Lay Dying, and first-novelist Kimball pumps up the parallel by presenting the journey entirely through the alternating narratives of the familys two surviving children, both of whom, like Vardaman Bundren in Faulkners novel, are obsessed with the problem of understanding death. The boy copes with the traumas of death and uprooting by tabulating the household goods the family barters to get from one forgettable little town to the next (We traded my brothers life away to that other family when we traded my brothers cradle and other baby stuff away to them). His younger sister, struggling to recast her doll family as her shattered real family, finds her dead brother wherever she looks (You cant stop dead people from going away to somewhere dead inside you). The melding of the two childishly matter-of-fact voices produces some rude poetry (America gets emptier the farther away you go up into it, avers the brother), but the effect of such relentless literal-mindedness, at first powerful, eventually becomes grueling and finally tedious, like a long car trip with your own parents, even if your dead brother isnt in the trunk. Long before the end, you appreciate why Faulkner surrounded his own child narrator with adults whose take on their journey, if no more perceptive, was inarticulate in refreshingly different ways. -- Copyright �2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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