The Used World

It was mid-December in Jonah, Indiana, a place where Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead. So Haven Kimmel, bestselling author of A Girl Named Zippy, prepares us to enter The Used World — a world where big hearts are frequently broken and sometimes repaired; where the newfangled and the old-fashioned battle it out in daily encounters both large and small; where wondrous things unfold just beneath the surface of everyday life; and where the weather is certainly biblical and might just be prophetic.

Hazel Hunnicutt's Used World Emporium is a sprawling antique store that is the station at the end of the line for objects that sometimes appeared tricked into visiting there. Hazel, the proprietor, is in her sixties, and it's a toss-up as to whether she's more attached to her mother or her cats. She's also increasingly attached to her two employees: Claudia Modjeski — freakishly tall, forty-odd years old — who might finally be undone by the extreme loneliness that's dogged her all of her life; and Rebekah Shook, pushing thirty, still living in her fervently religious father's home, and carrying the child of the man who recently broke her heart. The three women struggle — separately and together, through relationships, religion, and work — to find their place in this world. And it turns out that they are bound to each other not only by the past but also by the future, as not one but two babies enter their lives, turning their formerly used world brand-new again.

Astonishing for what it reveals about the human capacity for both grace and mischief, The Used World forms a loose trilogy with Kimmel's two previous novels, The Solace of Leaving Early and Something Rising (Light and Swift). This is a book about all of America by way of a single Midwestern town called Jonah, and the actual breathing histories going on as Indiana's stark landscape is transformed by dying small-town centers and proliferating big-box stores and SUVs. It's about generations of deception, anguish, and love, and the idiosyncratic ways spirituality plays out in individual lives. By turns wise and hilarious, tender and fierce, heartrending and inspiring, The Used World charts the many meanings of the place we call home.

"'Kimmel (Something Rising (Light and Swift); A Girl Named Zippy) returns to rural Indiana in her expansive third novel. Hazel Hunnicut is the proprietor of Hazel Hunnicut's Used World Emporium, 'the station at the end of the line' for myriad antiques and junk in Jonah, Ind. With her passel of cats and distaste for convention, Hazel is eccentric but grudgingly beloved by her two employees: Claudia, a tall and lonely woman ostracized for her androgynous appearance, and Rebekah, who is still recovering from an oppressive Pentecostal upbringing. With a nudge from Hazel and the appearance of an abandoned infant (whose junkie mother, a friend of Hazel's junkie sister, is dead), the two women form a relationship, providing momentum as an unlikely family takes shape and hidden connections between the characters are revealed. The story has many satisfying layers, but melding them requires Kimmel to jump around in time, sometimes to confusing results (among the pasts visited are Rebekah's childhood; Hazel's upbringing and the backstory on her relationship with the locals; and dreamlike visions of a long-ago romance between a black groundskeeper and a white judge's daughter). It's an intriguing puzzle box of a novel with a few edges left unsanded. (Sept.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Haven Kimmel's third novel takes place at Christmastime in the fictional town of Jonah, Ind., where cornfields and traditional farms have given way to prefab housing, Wal-Mart and NASCAR Nation. At its center is a big antiques mall (or junk shop, depending on your perspective) called Hazel Hunnicutt's Used World Emporium. Divided into a rambling sequence of booths and displays, the Used World is 'a... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) cavernous space,' Kimmel tells us, 'filled with the castoffs of countless lives, as much a grave in its way as any ruin.' The three women who work at the emporium are unreconstructed misfits of different generations. Hazel, the owner, is 65, a gruff, good-hearted businesswoman who lives with many cats and offers an eccentric brand of maternal comfort to her two employees, both mourning their own mothers. These are Claudia, an extremely tall, sometimes suicidal woman in her 40s who is often mistaken for a man, and Rebekah, a 20-something waif who is running away from the Prophetic Mission, the sternly repressive Pentecostal community in which she was raised.

Like Hazel in her curiosity shop, Haven Kimmel is herself a purveyor of odds and ends. Her novels are warehouses of miscellany, crammed with oddball characters, brief glimpses of violence and slapstick, long forays into theological matters, smatterings of John Donne scholarship (in her first novel, 'The Solace of Leaving Early') and meditations on the finer points of pool hustling (in her second, 'Something Rising (Light and Swift)'). 'The Used World' is the third novel in this casual trilogy, sharing with the earlier books a few repeating characters and an eastern Indiana locale. Kimmel's subjects are serious, having mostly to do with the mysteries of death, grief, romantic love and religious faith. At the same time, a buoyantly goofy sensibility presides over her fiction, whose disorderly glee clashes somewhat with the gravity of her themes.

In 'The Used World,' for instance, Yuletide is an occasion for earnest examinations of Christian faith for Claudia, who is searching tentatively for a path toward belief, and for Rebekah, who is trying to escape it. It's also a time when not one but two tender and mild infants unexpectedly make their appearances: Claudia becomes the reluctant caretaker of a baby boy left behind by murderous, drug-addled bikers, while Rebekah finds herself homeless and pregnant with the child of a slacker songwriter who romanced and dumped her soon after she abandoned her Pentecostal community. Meanwhile, the ghosts of Christmases past haunt everyone, especially Hazel, whose opulent childhood home hid a multitude of destructive secrets that trouble her to this day.

In unsubtle contrast with these symbol-heavy scenarios, Kimmel presents the town's contemporary holiday festivities as a free-for-all of giddy consumerism. It's a phantasmagoria of front-yard inflatable snowmen and Santa knickknacks, of towering SUVs with their cargos of string lights and wrapping paper, and of a dizzying proliferation of manufactured objects that spill out of the malls, the cars, the Used World: objects glossy and new or old and freighted with death, objects meant to be gathered up and grouped together to simulate an idea of home.

All three of Kimmel's protagonists yearn for home, and all have felt its fragility, have learned how much sturdier are the certainties of loss and impermanence. When Rebekah left the Prophetic Mission, 'she lost things she hadn't even known she'd miss. She'd gone from having seven aunts and uncles and thirty cousins to being shunned. ... The singing and potluck dinners and weddings and baptisms: gone. The Faith that had been a body slung over her bones: gone.'

How to rediscover faith in this used and broken world, during a vacuous holiday season, in a junk shop tricked out to look like home, among the old eggbeaters and heavy black telephones of the dead? Kimmel manages to suggest that hope is possible here, urging her trio of unhappy pilgrims, along with two unanticipated babies, into a peculiar but convincingly loving family. She accomplishes this not by tidying up all the book's odds and ends, as other writers might, but by leaving them loose. The questions her characters ask — 'Where is the past, exactly?' wonders Hazel — are always more vital than the answers. In an interview with Powells.com in 2004, Kimmel mentioned why she spent 2 1/2 years studying religion in a Quaker seminary in the early 1990s. 'I realized that if ... I wanted to be a writer at all, I would have to commit myself to asking the largest questions of life I knew how to ask, and it seemed to me that those were questions about time and death and change.'

Stuffing these questions into an already overcrowded narrative, Kimmel pulls off an unexpectedly affecting novelistic coup, in which sunny exuberance exists side by side with solemnity, faith sits next to doubt, the past cohabits with the present, and the ineffable cozies up to the real. That so messy a book forms such a satisfying whole is a bit of a miracle. Then again, as Kimmel explains Hazel's motivation for setting up shop in the Used World Emporium: 'Somebody had to do something with all that junk.'

" Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who often reviews fiction for The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[A] book that's entertaining to read but it's also smart. It takes on the taboo subjects of abortion and religion in unexpected ways." Chicago Sun-Times

"Kimmel gives us an ending that is satisfyingly rich but not too pat, leaving us wondering where these three memorable women go from here." Boston Globe

"[Kimmel] surpasses herself in this novel and has given us a reading experience that can transform the soul." Charlotte Observer

"Kimmel covers an encyclopedic range of emotions in this tale of love, loss, and the irrevocable acts that define us." Booklist

From the bestselling author of A Girl Named Zippy comes her astonishing breakout novel about family, history, spirituality, and love — and the many meanings of the place called home.

Haven Kimmel is the author of the memoir A Girl Named Zippy. She studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University. She also attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.