Miraculous Word Smoke

Can “a complete idiot, a narcissist, a navel gazer, and a philanderer” transform himself into so profound a hero that many consider him miraculous? This strange question underlies Geoff Herbach’s even stranger debut novel, and its affirmation is the Herculean task Herbach undertakes.

Some readers may recognize Herbach as the whimsical, self-deprecatory writer who plays a cartoonish version of himself in Electric Arc Radio, the cult-comedy live radio show now in its third season. In The Miracle Letters, Herbach’s protagonist, T. Rimberg, riffs on the same low self-esteem theme, but the mood in the novel is macabre and for the most part lacks the wacky irreverence of the radio show. 

Comparing the two is not quite fair, though. The novel is told through various letters and documents, so we first find Rimberg wasted, summing up his troubles in a suicide note to Jesus. “My wife took my kids, Jesus. She left me. My goddamn girlfriend left me, too! My job is nowhere, horror, dumb-assed, dry eyes always dizzy at a damn computer. I don’t care!” Luckily, before Rimberg can kill himself, he receives a large inheritance check from his estranged father, which eventually leads him across the Atlantic on a search for his Jewish roots. 

Through letters at first to his family and co-workers, and later to everyone from Anne Frank to Aunt Jemima to Madonna, we follow Rimberg’s mind down a spiraling path into drugs and mental illness. His suicidal bipolarity comes off as insincere and crass at first, then—with the sort of psychological insight that Herbach’s best writing contains—his bipolarity becomes a backdrop against which Rimberg finds new if nominal purpose. But that’s not the end of it. Just when the reader has accepted Rimberg’s mental illness as an innocuous (maybe even redemptive) character trait, it suddenly becomes deadly serious.

Though Herbach’s narrative suffers from an excess of maudlin wallowing, beneath all the drunken sound and stoned fury he signifies, among other things, a standard story arc. The lost, empty human vessel must go on a journey through which he discovers the history that fulfills his sense of self.

Arc in hand, Herbach’s challenge moves to execution, and this is where he encounters some trouble. Nearly all of Rimberg’s familial epiphanies are based on a series of nightmares, painstakingly described numerous times, almost to the point of monotony. What’s more, with Rimberg’s nightmares Herbach ushers the reader into the dicey realm of the supernatural, endowing Rimberg with an enigmatic sixth sense that’s necessary to urge the plot forward. When Rimberg reaches his epiphany, Herbach allows him to explain away its significance with the pithy and underwhelming “History shapes people. I had no history.” Instead of feeling cathartic, Rimberg’s genealogical realization seems haphazard and lame.

Another challenge for the reader is bearing with a deeply unlikable Rimberg for at least the first half of the book. He reveals an adolescence full of sickening if venial sins, for which he sentimentally apologizes. Rimberg also frequently inserts the name of whomever he is writing to—“I had it reined in, Chelsea,” or “Chelsea, oh no”—which becomes an obnoxious verbal tic after a while.

Though the later, mostly sedated Rimberg can be an endearing character (he writes a terrifically poignant letter to Brett Favre), the task of transforming him into an actual hero represents a formidable challenge. Even if the point is to show that a fallible everyman can redeem himself through a heroic deed, that point is difficult to swallow as more than an academic exercise; the writing has no true heart.

The novel ends with the symbolic bombast of a miracle, and whether or not readers buy the miraculous transformation Herbach is trying to sell may determine their ultimate reaction to the book. The documents that make up the novel have been arranged, in fact, by a Father Barry McGinn as evidence validating what Rimberg has gone through as a bona fide gift from the Almighty. Heroes must earn their status legitimately, though—not through literary sleight of hand that makes everything they do look like a trick of smoke and words.

The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg,
by Geoff Herbach
Three Rivers Press, 320 pp., $14