Letter perfect

It began with a suicide letter to Jesus.

After an affair with his secretary Chelsea, work-related woes, a messy divorce, and a whole lot of cursing and drinking, Theodore Rimberg decides to do himself in. So he starts writing suicide letters to everyone in his life, including friends, family, high-school teachers and even celebrities (including JC).

His missives make up the bulk of The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg, the debut novel of Geoff Herbach, cofounder of Lit6—a Minnesota-based group that tours the country in a bus, stopping to perform live readings. Herbach juxtaposed the letters with the character’s journal entries and transcriptions of conversations between T. and Barry McGinn, a Catholic priest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who thinks the self-loathing man has caused a miracle.

“Originally I started writing just funny, throw-away suicide letters, which sounds sort of disgusting,” Herbach says, on the phone from his home near St. Paul, Minnesota. “And pretty soon this character emerged who was writing all of them, and I thought, Wow, it would be kinda cool if I could carry a narrative of only suicide letters across a whole book.”

When Rimberg receives a hefty inheritance from his father, whom he believes is still alive and living somewhere in Europe, he leaves Minnesota to fly across the ocean and search for him. On the trip, he tries to reconcile his family history and further understand his own Jewish/Lutheran identity. Somewhere amid all of this, he triggers a miracle, an event that remains a mystery until the end of the book, when T. concludes his journey with a stay in Green Bay.

“T. is a person who did not reflect a whole lot on who he was: He had a terrible relationship with his brother, a father who disappeared and a mother who was too busy to pay much attention,” Herbach says. “The thought was that, in actually writing [letters to] all these people, he would reflect for the first time and be able to work things out.”

Herbach includes Madonna and Brett Favre on the list of people T. Rimberg writes to for similar reasons: “Those people in the age of cable become the real players, the figures to look up to, in an unhealthy way—I think—for people who are isolated,” he says.

The intense, confessional writing reads a lot like therapy on the page. And to reinforce that notion, Herbach brings in a theme constantly discussed in psychoanalysis: the idea that we are always mirroring our parents’ lives, re-experiencing what they have in fact experienced, and at the same time, trying to escape that pattern. In Rimberg’s case, this hits hardest when he’s in Europe and relives Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”), the 1938 evening when Nazis and rioters smashed the windows of synagogues, Jewish shops and businesses in Germany and Austria—often dubbed the beginning of the Holocaust. Rimberg’s relatives were there. It’s what transforms the novel, and all those suicide notes, from gimmick to meditation and what ultimately allows it to succeed.

“I’m really curious about the way that trauma in past generations kind of manifests itself [now],” Herbach says. “And I think everybody, to some extent, is constantly trying to break the mold and not be their parents, and learn from their parents’ mistakes.”

Surprisingly, in the midst of Rimberg’s confessional writing and his ongoing search for clarity, a comic undertone surfaces—a technique that Herbach knows well from his work with the Lit6 project.

“When Sam Osterhout and I were developing Lit6 in the first place, the idea was to write really serious stuff but to be very funny about it and present it in an entertaining way so that people are able to get the information that you’d want to put across if you were writing a very serious piece, but they’ll listen to it because it’s funny,” Herbach says. “And I think that The Miracle reflects that to a large extent.”

Herbach reads Friday 25.