Miraculous Word Smoke

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