THE SACRAMENTO BEE BOOK CLUB

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Eccentric on cue: Haven Kimmel's as quirky as the characters in her pool-hustling novel By Alison apRoberts -- Bee Staff Writer Published Jan. 21, 2004 You can't predict just how Haven Kimmel will find her way home, but she always does. Like the time she passed by a pool hall in North Carolina and saw something familiar. Through the window was a pool table with a surface as flat and green as the Indiana farm fields she ran through as a kid. It was a moment that came as though on cue for a novelist in search of a calling for a protagonist, Cassie Claiborne, whose story spins through "Something Rising (Light and Swift)." "It was a gift," Kimmel says, describing that moment. "I knew Cassie's character, but I didn't know what she does in the world. That question vexed me most of all: What is her passion?" Once she had Cassie's game lined up -- as a young pool hustler -- Kimmel finished her latest novel and won critical acclaim and devoted readers. The novel is The Bee Book Club's selection for January. Kimmel will speak and answer questions beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria in downtown Sacramento. In "Something Rising," Kimmel plays a quirky game of storytelling, peopled by inspired and eccentric characters in her native rural Indiana. There is at the story's center Cassie, a tough young woman long on drive and heart and short on words (at times, she's more likely to express herself with a tire iron than conversation); her sister, a scholarly agoraphobic who swears her life would be easier if someone in her family just understood the tragedy of Orestes in the plays by Aeschylus; their mother, Laura, who relies on nonstop cigarettes and bright, biting observations to avoid facing her own life; and their achingly absent father, a stylish pool hustler who abandons them. Talking to Kimmel by phone in her home in Durham, N.C., it is clear she is as quirky as any of her characters. Don't let that measured Midwestern speaking style mislead you. Hers was not a typical farm family, even though the setting was a rural town of 300. Her mother, after years spent reading on the couch, went to college and now teaches English to maximum-security prisoners. Her father was fond of gambling and worked at something, but the kids never knew quite what. Kimmel's parents divorced when she was 12. Kimmel chose her words sparingly and purposefully even as a small child. Her very first popped out when she was almost 3. "I'll make a deal with you," she said to her father when he told her she had to give up her bottle. But he turned down her offer to hide it whenever company came. Kimmel moved so impetuously as a little kid that she earned the nickname of Zippy. She hasn't slowed down. "I'm a leaper," she says of her life path. The jumps she has made include changing her first name at 18, taking on the first name of a Kentucky country singer named Haven Hughes. (She won't reveal her given name.) At 19, she was married and had a daughter. She finished college in literature and became a poet. She attended a Quaker seminary school for several years. She gave up poetry and wrote a memoir published in 2001, "A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana." The book made it to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best seller list. It was also a "Today Show" book club selection. She proved that she could write stories besides her own with the publication of "The Solace of Leaving Early," her first novel. It was recently optioned to be made into a movie. There's nothing small or small-town about Kimmel's life today. At 38, she is on track to have five books published within five years. She says she writes all the time, but her life is hardly that of a contemplative writer. Her household includes her son, Obadiah, 7, along with five dogs, a cat and a fish. (One of her books is "Orville: A Dog Story," written for children and published last year.) Her daughter, Kat, is 19 and away at college. Kimmel lives in Durham but also keeps an apartment in New Orleans where she spends time writing -- and eating so well that "it's like a religious experience." She has spent many hours on book tours and in the limelight. She chatted with Katie Couric on national TV after her memoir became a "Today" book club selection. But celebrity is not much to her. "I don't really think of myself as that person, as a person who is photographed by Entertainment Weekly," she says. "My real life is, 'How do I write the best books I can?' " She describes her prolific pace in terms that recall the seminarian she once was. "It's a calling," she says. It's not so much a matter of deadlines or making money that drive her, she adds: "It's more to do with a very acute consciousness of the passage of time. I'm here very briefly to do a very specific thing, so I really ought to." Among one of Kimmel's more remarkable feats is her use of Indiana as a setting, although she has not lived there for 20 years. "I could not have written these novels about Indiana if I still lived there," Kimmel says. "Once I had this distance from it, I could see it. I could look back on that place as setting." "Something Rising" is the second in a set of three novels that Kimmel envisions as a "trilogy of place." The first was "Solace" and the third, which is nearly done, is "The Used World." As preview of the next, she offers a description that promises yet more quirky characters: "I don't know how to say what it's about, but it's a story of a woman who is 6-foot-4 and another woman who has walked away from a fundamentalist Christian sect." She joins a rather short list of literary lights to come out of Indiana, including the 19th century poet James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote "Little Orphant Annie," and the 20th century writer Kurt Vonnegut. "She made Indiana a real place you can write about," says Elizabeth Slattery, a lecturer of writing at Indiana University East in Richmond, Ind. "She does this amazing thing: She somehow marries that quirky redneck white-trash character with a lot more intelligence than you expect." Though Kimmel writes of the Midwest, she considers herself a Southern writer, and she has been compared to Carson McCullers. But it is a voice learned at home, because the area she came from was settled by people from Kentucky and Tennessee. One of her fans in her adopted Southern hometown is Tom Campbell, co-owner of the Regulator Bookshop in Durham. "The first thing that comes to my mind is she's a free spirit," he says. "The thing that may be a little confusing is there's a lot of depth to her that is not at first apparent. When someone is funny, charming and attractive, that's what people see, but there's a lot more to her than that." Asked if Kimmel's new book falls into a women's literature category, Campbell hesitates and then says, "It's tough-love chick-lit." Kimmel doesn't argue with Campbell's characterization, and speaks affectionately about the real women who inspired the character of Cassie. "She is a fictional amalgam of a very certain kind of Midwestern farm girl who is taciturn and very competent and very hard," Kimmel says. "I knew a number of those women when I was growing up; it takes a long time to understand them." The game of pool is in some ways like those women -- it's hard and you can't rush your understanding of it. To grasp the game for her novel, Kimmel spent a lot of time playing in pool halls, including the Green Room in Durham. Among those who frequent the room is Daniel Wideman, a writer, poet and pool player. He never has played against Kimmel, but he was there when Entertainment Weekly took her picture. He is not surprised to find other writers at the tables. "It's not unprecedented for literary figures to have a pool jones," Wideman says. (British novelist Martin Amis is one of the more famous literary players.) "I think writers are pretty disciplined and monomaniacal about their work, and pool players are the same," Wideman says. Using pool as a framework for a novel also makes sense, he says, by allowing a writer to "take a sprawling subject like life and put it within boundaries where you can make sense of everything." Perhaps part of what Kimmel saw in the pool table's flat surface was more than a topographical resemblance to Indiana. The serene surface belies the dynamic nature of the game, just as the sleepiness and smallness of a Midwestern town can belie the large passions that drive its inhabitants. The game itself suits her, Kimmel says. "It is brainy and it's private," she says. "People respect the silence and give one another a lot of space." But is she any good at the game? "I'm an unpredictable player," she says, laughing. "A friend of mine who accompanied me often said, 'You never know with Haven.' " About the Writer --------------------------- The Bee's Alison apRoberts can be reached at (916) 321-1113 or aaproberts@sacbee.com.