Kimmel's new 'World' filled with light

First imagine an antiques mall "filled with the cast-offs of countless lives, as much a grave as any ruin." Not far from this cavernous place, a dead junkie's baby is waiting for a mother; a myopic Pentecostal leader with a shady history has tossed his pregnant daughter out of his home; and, a minister with an enviable sense of humor and proportion is pondering the nature of God's love. It's mid-December, weeks before Christmas in fictional Jonah, Indiana, a place where, "Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead." All of this and more comes to life in Haven Kimmel's third and most ambitious novel, "The Used World," the last of a trilogy connected by place and a flawed yet consistently captivating cast of characters -- three women at a crossroads, ministers and junkies, farmers and retired Chrysler workers, the faithful and the faithless -- doing whatever it takes to get them through each day.

As fans of Kimmel's work already know and new admirers will soon discover, Kimmel tends lovingly to the small: "a whisper of conversation like a slip of sea rushing into a jar and kept like a souvenir," and wood grain that "looked like caramel being poured hot from a pan." Nothing is too trivial for her attention. However, Kimmel's true genius is her ability, like Flannery O'Connor, to tell stories about compromised characters we care for, while simultaneously lacing those stories with humor and meditations on time, death, faith and the unseen metaphysical world. In O'Connor's world there is a moment of grace; in Kimmel's world there is solace to be found in the most unexpected places.

As with her previous novels, "The Solace of Leaving Early" and "Something Rising (Light and Swift)," Kimmel sets "The Used World" in an indeterminate present, hinting somewhere between 1989 and 1995. She then deploys her arresting prose, her seeker's searchlight, her formidable intelligence, and her generous heart to tell the intertwined stories of Hazel, Claudia and Rebekah who work together at Hazel Hunnicut's Used World Emporium. Never one to confuse religion with spirituality, Kimmel creates portraits of three women who have been raised with religion; nonetheless, when the novel opens, each is caught in a spiritual cul-de-sac.

The 40-something, tall and androgynous-looking Claudia, ostracized for her looks and questionable sexual identity all of her life, can no longer ignore or endure the isolation which has been compounded by her mother's death. Claudia tells her minister, Amos, "There's something missing in my life. ... Sometimes the hole in the day is big, it seems to cover everything."

Rebekah -- nearly 30, but more child than self-possessed woman -- rejects the strict Prophetic Mission sect she was raised in for 23 years and finds herself utterly bereft. Motherless, "exiled from the wider population of her peers," and now pregnant with the child of a man who has left her, "She was to be a mother without property, stability or a mate ... the person an entire church despised, a father would renounce."

Only Hazel's mother is still alive. Kimmel suggests that we learn mothering from watching our mothers, and so it falls to Hazel, a 60-something woman who lives with many cats and is blessed with hard-won wisdom to step in as Claudia's and Rebekah's "patron, and the pause in their conversation." Although Hazel is the pluckiest of the three (she can use a gun and would wrestle a pit bull if necessary), in matters of the heart she has kept herself on the outer edge of close relationships for too many years. Hazel has always believed, "there was nothing more dangerous than the past," but as Kimmel explores her characters' past and secret histories in chapters that move backward in time, after we know the whole of the hearts and their histories, they and we realize that the past, once confronted and put to rest, "isn't so bad."

Hazel leads Claudia to the dead junkie's baby whom Claudia adopts. From that point on, a series of sometimes hilarious, often heartrending, and always compelling events unfold, culminating in a startling, but well-orchestrated plot twist.

Although these heroines are as different from one another as the items they sell at Hazel's Used World Emporium, their yearning to awaken their sleeping spirituality will awaken the sleeping spirituality in us all.

"The Used World" is so full of riches, it would be downright unwise not to read it immediately. Haven Kimmel has created a convincing, fierce, funny, compassionate novel of grit and faith that shines much needed light on our ragged, well-worn world.