The Way the Family Got Away Book

The Way the Family Got Away attempts to reconstruct the imaginative universe of pre-school children in pre-school child language. The narrative outline is given in the first chapter. The youngest son of a family in Mineola, Texas, dies. Putting his body in the boot of the family car along with all their other belongings, the family heads off for Bompa's house in Michigan. Along the way it must sell off all its possessions to pay for food and gas. Since we know the family gets there in the end (though the final chapter is not without a twist), the interest of the narrative becomes predominantly psychological. However, narrated from the perspective of the surviving children, the journey assumes an epic quality--an infant, white-trash Odyssey; a surreal, elegiac On the Road; a painful and courageous grappling with the failures and possibilities of making meaning. Kimball speculates brilliantly on the linguistic and imaginative universe of childhood, reproducing many of the insights of the great psychoanalyst of children, Melanie Klein. The games that the children play with their string and paper dolls represent bizarre yet moving attempts to come to terms with the death of their little brother and the new pregnancy of their mother: We cut me and my clothes open to get the baby out of me and blood. But our baby only came out doll-baby. It wasn't crying or talking or eating and angel or folded up and paper or big enough either. It wasn't alive or living. Our doll baby was bloody with my Momma and string. Inner and outer worlds are blurred in a series of strange symbolic exchanges as the difficulties the children have in coming to terms with the experience of death, sex, loss and birth are dramatised. The imaginative challenges of writing about childhood using only the intellectual resources of childhood are formidable. Kimball meets them head on and has written a visceral, wrenching and compelling account of a family's collapse. That the formal challenges are met with determination and success, that the novel appears to have been wrested whole from a landscape of devastation and pain allows the reader a certain exhilaration as well. Neville HoadRead More