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.