Unsettling and gripping in equal parts, Michael Kimball’s fifth novel is a strikingly simple yet exceedingly disturbing portrait of a man known as ‘Big Ray’. Opening with the demise of its titular character, the novel is narrated by Ray’s son Daniel in 500 epigrammatic entries which oscillate between past and present as Daniel prepares for his father’s funeral while reminiscing upon the old man’s legacy, his own childhood, and memories long suppressed.
The succinct, clearly demarcated entries effectively and seamlessly carry us through Daniel’s journey of recovery and retribution. Ranging from a mere sentence to a few paragraphs, Kimball’s words linger in the mind, long after reading, to heightened dramatic effect.
I don’t know if it counts as a kind of suicide – to eat yourself to death.
This tension that Kimball is so adroit at fostering creates a foreboding atmosphere as he innocuously lets slip seemingly inconsequential bits of information.
After my father died, I was remembering the underwear and the eggs with my sister and she was dumbfounded. The smell of greasy eggs makes her sick too. Her therapist wonders if that smell is a trigger for something that happened to us, but neither one of us can remember what happened after we left the kitchen.
Accounts of domestic abuse, child neglect and the crime of complicity run aplenty in this nuanced portrait of a dysfunctional family. Recounted through Daniel’s unflinching retrospective gaze, the incidents are rendered all the more horrific as Kimball’s seemingly cavalier storytelling style is juxtaposed against the grave atrocities that form the basis of his narrative.
Despite depicting a largely odious character, Kimball successfully steers clear from monochromatic depictions of emotions and one-dimensional characters; Daniel’s feelings towards his father are complex and often contradictory. Love, animosity, reverence, fear, shame and disgust meld together to form a powerful backdrop against which Daniel uncovers his late father’s legacy.
Just as Daniel does not completely abhor his father, Ray is not painted as an unequivocally loathsome person.
I don’t understand my complicated feelings about my father. I hated him, but I wanted him to like me. I was ashamed of him, but I wanted him to be proud of me.
Although Ray is characterised by his cruel and abusive nature, it is his obesity which, retrospectively, becomes one of his most defining characteristics.
The size of my father could be terrifying. I think that partly defined our relationship. It is important to understand what my father looked like to understand what my father was like.
The powerful image on the novel’s front cover of a sofa – sunken from the sheer weight of the person who last sat in it, yet strangely disembodied due to that person’s absence – seems symbolic of the relationship Daniel shared with his father. Overbearing, with an omniscient presence, Ray continues to haunt Daniel – even after his death.
Inspired in part by Kimball’s own relationship with his father, the book assumes a life of its own; a life that may be all too familiar and disconcerting for some given the reality it portrays.
Conspicuously concise yet brutally effective, Big Ray culminates in an extremely unsettling memory that delves into the very core of what was wrong with Ray. With an astonishing rawness, Kimball deftly manoeuvres around a perennial moral dilemma: we are expected and obligated to love our parents, but is it still possible to love them when they have wronged us the most?
I still don’t like my father, but I still miss him.
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Big Ray
By Michael Kimball
Paperback, 182pp, RRP $29.99
ISBN: 9781408828052
Bloomsbury Circus
