num_pages: 383
description: Michael Kimball first caught my attention in 1985 with Firewater Pond a boisterously comic novel set in rural Maine and populated by an assortment of aging hippies horny teenagers and scheming small town politicians. After much too long a silence Kimball resurfaced in 1996 with Undone a suspense novel that marked a major change of artistic direction. Now a mere four years later Kimball has published his third novel Mouth to Mouth. It too is a suspense novel and it's a beauty: a moody brooding Gothic account of murder madness and festering family secrets.Mouth to Mouth opens with a set piece in which most of the elements of the subsequent tragedy move quickly into view. The scene ironically is a wedding. Moreen Chambers 17 years old and very pregnant has just married a 27-year-old outlaw named Randy a violent potentially abusive loser who works as an enforcer for a local loan shark. Moreen's mother Ellen whose own marriage has fallen on difficult times despises her new son-in-law and foresees nothing but a bleak unhappy future for her daughter. As Ellen stands contemplating the travesty-in-progress looking like someone who is wondering if it's possible to get away with murder an attractive stranger whispers in her ear: Actually it is.The stranger it turns out is Neal Chambers 24-year-old nephew of Ellen's husband Scott. Twelve years before in the wake of his father's suicide Neal and his mother had left the town of Destin Maine behind and have not been heard from since. As we quickly learn the suicide of Jonathan Chambers was the direct result of an adulterous affair between his brother Scott and his wife April. That 12-year-old tragedy the details of which have never been fully revealed dominates the backdrop of the primary narrative casting a long remorseless shadow over everything that happens in this book.Neal is a charismatic figure who exerts a powerful -- and immediate -- erotic hold over Ellen Chambers. Within days of Moreen's wedding Neal is ensconced at the Chambers's sheep farm having volunteered to rebuild their dilapidated barn a task he completes with almost superhuman efficiency in 12 days. (Twelve by the way is a talismanic number for Neal and shows up repeatedly throughout the novel.) At the same time Neal volunteers to help Ellen resolve her son-in-law problem. Ellen's ambiguous response to this offer -- which she neither condones nor actively forbids -- comes back to haunt her when early in the novel Randy suffers a sudden accident while repairing a leak in the Chamber's dammed-up pond.The next stage of the novel concerns Ellen's gradual realization that she has allowed a psychopath to enter her life and that her son-in-law's fate is just a single element in a complex -- and demented -- agenda that Neal has been working toward since his father's suicide 12 years before. This agenda encompasses Neal's entire family all of whom have been targeted -- according to a bizarre but precise numerological system -- for punishments that reflect Neal's deeply twisted sense of poetic justice. Mouth to Mouth is an intelligent emotionally wrenching novel that does its work on more than one level. First of all it is a tense thoroughly professional thriller that becomes more and more absorbing as the narrative progresses. Kimball has the true writer's eye for character action and atmosphere and his novel is filled with vividly constructed sequences -- a protracted drowning a forbidden erotic encounter between Ellen and Neal a staged conflagration in the Chambers's newly rebuilt barn a climactic encounter in a frozen flooded valley -- that are alternately frightening and hypnotically fascinating.But the real heart of Mouth to Mouth is Kimball's painstaking portrait of a family collapsing under the combined weight of guilt silence and secrecy. As Neal proceeds with his schemes he locates the fault lines in a damaged family that has more than its share of dysfunctional characteristics to begin with. As Ellen struggles helplessly against the tidal pull of events her marriage flounders her personal and professional lives slide simultaneously out of control and her distant incommunicative daughter drifts further and further out of reach. Kimball catches all of this with sympathy and precision and the result is a powerful sometimes desolating account of the destruction -- and partial reconstruction -- of a deeply vulnerable family. This more than anything gives Mouth to Mouth its emotional and dramatic center lifting it well above the level of its numerous less ambitious competitors. --Bill Sheehan
language: English
title: Mouth to Mouth
publisher: Avon Books