'Iodine' by Haven Kimmel
BOOK REVIEW
THERE IS something deeply unsettling about "Iodine," Haven Kimmel's latest novel. It's not that the novel is particularly shocking per se -- surprising since the first line is a stunner: "I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed." Instead, it's the sense of manipulation that rises so that you're never quite sure if you're dealing with an unreliable narrator or a deceptive author. There's no shame in either approach, really, provided the final execution doesn't rely on great heaps of exposition. A reader will believe an unreliable narrator's parallax view provided there is some bedrock of truth; if we can't trust the narrator, we must be able to trust the author.
Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing" used a similar juxtaposition between narrator and author in explicating the human mystery of memory, and it stands as a firm literary sister to Kimmel's work. Where Atwood looked at identity, emotional cataclysm and societal malaise through the rubric of second-wave feminism, Kimmel uses post-Jungian psychology, but both finally linger on a singular conceit: Are we to believe what we've been shown?
Trace Pennington is a college senior with two majors and four minors. Her breadth of intelligence is such that she's typically three steps ahead of her professors. But this is no Tri-Delt living a charmed college life. Instead, Trace lives in an abandoned house in the middle of rural Indiana, showers at the truck stop, reads by kerosene lamp, cooks by Sterno flame. Trace whiles away the hours scrawling by hand her thoughts, memories and dreams in a free-verse frenzy of erudition.
Trace inhabits two separate lives. The first, in what we are led to believe is the real time of the late 1980s, is of a college student named Ianthe Covington (an identity she's taken from a tombstone to hide from her abusive mother, Loretta) who falls in love with an enigmatic professor named Jacob Matthias. It is this love affair that causes the unwinding of Trace as she is forced to confront her past. Her journal life reveals a twisted family: The sainted father Colt, whom she loved passionately and who looked the other way at her abuse; a brother, Billy, who tried to protect her but who has disappeared; and a sister, Dusty, who used drugs to sharpen her previously soft edges.
