The Solace of Leaving Early

by Haven Kimmel

Book Overview

A heart rending story of the lives of a few inhabitants of a small American town and the massive effect of one very violent death. Langston Braverman has just walked out on her PhD oral exams and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400033349
• ISBN13: 9781400033348
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A really beautiful little book

First of all, I could just hug Haven Kimmel for not falling into the trap that so many of today's authors fall into, which is in thinking that if 50,000 words are good, then 500,000,000 will be EVEN BETTER. It was a great pleasure to read such a tightly woven story and gave me the impression that Kimmel has really WORKED on her craft as a writer -- she has the discipline to keep her writing spare and lean. The characters were lovely. Okay, I got a bit weary of Amos' constant pedantic mental plodding through books of theological thought that are obscure to anyone who hasn't spent time in a seminary, and there were times when I wished I could yank Langston out of the pages by her wrist, give her a smack in the head and then shove her back into the story, but Kimmel's resolution of the quirks of the two characters was worth these annoyances. At first, I thought Kimmel was just being show-offy of (and boresome about) her own time spent in seminary and graduate school, but as the characters opened up, I perceived there was a reason. Langston's mother was a jewel and the two little girls were haunting. Considering the subject matter (a brutal murder), this was a surprisingly witty book that made me laugh out loud several times at Kimmel's deft turn of a phrase. The ending was superb. I loved it. I recommend it highly. Kimmel is a gifted writer. (P.S. I had those little cream cheese mints at my own wedding and they aren't THAT bad.)

An exquisite little book

Haven Kimmel has a way of making prose feel like poetry. I rarely read a book twice, and I've read this one three times over the past 18 months. I've sent it to friends and to family and passed around copies to coworkers. Each time I start thinking about what so completely engaged me with the book, I go back to read it again. Ultimately, I think I love The Solace of Leaving Early because it leaves me feeling hopeful that after all the pain that comes with being human, it's still worth it to come along for the wobbly ride on this overpopulated planet. How to describe it? It features a cast of quirky characters in small-town Indiana and tells a tragic, often funny, story about how their lives weave together in love, compassion, and hope after horrific loss. I immediately found the self-doubting minister, Amos Townsend, endearing. (Picture a pious Hugh Grant.) He's the quintessential poster child for existential angst. Langston Braverman's character will probably annoy you at first, but hang in there--she eventually will win you over. A self-absorbed graduate student, Langston bags her Ph.D. program in the wake of a disastrous love affair with one of her professors. At home, licking her wounds and hiding out with her faithful dog, Germane, she finds herself drawn into the lives of Amos and two orphaned sisters. The little girls, Immaculata and Epiphany, turn to religious visions after watching their parents' violent deaths. Even so, you will laugh as often as you cry, because Haven Kimmel has a gift for funny and wry dialogue. The ending is...priceless! You don't want to miss this book.

Not your average light summer read

Placed into my hands by a woman at my neighborhood bookstore who said, 'Read this,' what a wonderful discovery this book was. Langston Braverman (and howz THAT for a great name for your character?) returns home (after a grim end to an affair and in the middle of her PhD orals) not for the usual reasons; she wants to get away from it all. But she find herself right in the middle of it all, the biggest 'it' being the death of her childhood friend and the fact that she's asked to help care for her friends deeply disturbed daughters. With great story lines, believable dialog, and revised Midwestern values, we read, compulsively hooked, as these troubled individuals struggle to find solace and peace. Wow, what a terrific book!

True solace

Forget love. Forget anger. Forget fear. The most powerful -- and mysterious -- human emotion is grief. It's also perhaps the most difficult emotion for a writer to explore. But in this remarkably assured and affecting debut novel, Haven Kimmel looks at grief with with deft assuredness, depth and compassion. Returning to a small town setting similar to her stunning 2001 memoir "A Girl Named Zippy," she weaves the compelling stories of self-absorbed Langston Braverman, guilt-burdened minister Amos, Langston's strong-willed mother and two visions-gripped girls, thrown together by a brutal tragedy. It's not a romance -- though there are romantic elements. It's not a melodrama -- every situation, every character response, rings true. Kimmel exceeds the gift for language and storytelling that already made "Zippy" such an entertaining and meaty read. And with both an eye for detail and honest feeling for her characters, she joins both the emerging elite of young American writers (Franzen, Chabon) and the company of such iconic southern/middle American writers as Ellen Gilchrist and Flannery O'Connor.

true solace

Forget love. Forget anger. Forget fear. The most powerful human emotion is grief. It's also the most mysterious, and yet the most concrete. Haven Kimmel, following her stellar memoir "A Girl Named Zippy," explores grief from four different experiences via the primary characters of this remarkable debut novel. Like Zippy, it's set in a tiny Indiana town, where Langston Braverman has returned upon abandoning her doctoral studies, only to find her deep self-absorption challenged by her mother, self-doubting minister Amos and two recently orphaned girls gripped by religious ecstasy. As all of them are thrown together by tragedy, each deals with his or her grief in distinctly different ways which Kimmel reveals in incredible depth and nuance as she weaves their increasingly entwined lives. It is not a romance -- though there are certainly romantic elements. It is not a melodrama -- at least not in any contrived way, in that every note of the story rings true to the people and situations. What "Solace" is is a confident and immensely readable work from a young writer with a true gift for language, feeling for her characters and the mysticism of everyday life. With this, Kimmel joins the ranks of today's top writers (Franzen, Chabon) as well such distinctly southern/middle American voices as Ellen Gilchrist and Flannery O'Connor.