Latest Kimball novel delivers on many levels

GREEN GIRLS, by Michael Kimball, William Morrow, New York, N.Y., 2002, hardcover, $24.95.

If you read enough contemporary American fiction, you can tell from the first 10 or 20 pages if the author is going to take you places, get you involved, even frighten you. Michael Kimball does all this and more. He gathers you in the sinewy arms of his intelligent prose and carries you off on an adventure that will have you making very sure the hall light is on before you start for your bedroom.

I can guarantee you that anyone who reads this fascinating story will never drive across the Piscataqua River Bridge that links Maine and New Hampshire without seeing it in an entirely different perspective. I’ve made the crossing hundreds of times and now that I’ve seen it through this author’s eyes, I know what I’ll be thinking and looking for on every future trip down the pike. Kimball’s vivid images, in short, are not easily forgotten.

This novel can be classified a mystery, and so it is – a many-sided mystery of subtlety and cleverness. But Kimball is a Writer with a capital W, no question about it. He crafts his characters with the skills of a Renaissance sculptor, and if you live within 50 miles of the Piscataqua River, you will find every detail of the novel’s landscape is exquisitely accurate, right down to the names of each store in the Kittery Mall.

The plot, too, is intricate and charged with surprise. You must pay attention, but you won’t mind because you know that each step along the way will take you to still another place, still another dimension of human behavior, still another town on the map of the Western Hemisphere you never expected to visit. Somehow, this very clever author takes you from the cobblestone streets of Portsmouth, lined with upscale boutiques, to the dark, wet jungles of Colombia, the coast of Georgia at Savannah and the Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, and does all of this quite within the bounds of his reader’s credibility.

He does the same with his characters: The writer, Jacob Winter, whose discovery of his wife’ infidelity wrenches the restraints of his New England manners and ignites rare and destructive violence; his son, Max, whom Jacob loves without reservation; the two “Green Girls” who enter his life, one of them from his schoolboy past; and a shaman from an ancient temple hidden in the jungles of Colombia; plus a former stock car racer now tending bar in what once was a New Hampshire waterfront mansion.

And the tiny, chrome-yellow frogs whose skin exudes a potent paralytic poison. Ah, but too much should not be revealed here. You need to have each surprise lying in wait, as it was so deftly crafted for you by a devilish and creative mind.

“You don’t know anything, do you?” one of the characters asks Jacob Winter, who is himself convinced he knows quite a lot. But does he? Both you, the reader, and Jacob must travel a long, hazardous maze of intricate and unexpected events before the complex truths the author has created at last become clearly discernible. There is adrenaline-pumping suspense all along the way, for Kimball is a master of the art, fashioning suspense with the precise and delicate skills of a diamond cutter. There are no slips here.

And there is very much New England, Maine and New Hampshire. There are the Red Sox, Little League, the coast and its marine commerce, striped bass and bluefish, the sharp-edged climate and people “from away,” to cite just a bit of the evidence that Kimball has deep roots in this small corner of the planet. He knows whereof he writes when it comes to both place and people. He tells a splendid story and tells it well. I’m going to look for those other three books of his. You should look for this one.