Book Review: *Breathing Out the Ghost* by Kirk Curnutt

Back of the book blurb:  Colin St. Claire is on a dangerous mission. His young son is missing, and he is on a self-appointed quest to find the boy, or at least find the man he believes is responsible.  Fueled by uppers and a profound lack of sleep, Colin’s road soon becomes an uncontrollable spiral of blurry white lines, of fleeting forms in the night, ghosts of memory as intangible as vapor . . . Assisting him is Robert Heim, a former private investigator who lost his license in the line of duty—and it is a sense of warped duty that still ties him to Colin, though his own family, a loving wife and children, beckons him back home . . . The answers for both men may lie not with the man they believe is the perpetrator, but with a long-suffering farmer’s wife, Beverly “Sis” Pruitt, whose own daughter was claimed by violence, years prior.

In the shape of a noir thriller, Curnutt fashions a gripping tale of the consequences of unchecked grief, of painful truths hidden as though they were dark secrets, and what salvation remains possible for good men who enter the darkness and become the ghosts they are chasing.

She is Too Fond of Books’ Review:   In a nutshell, Breathing Out the Ghost is a very sharply written account of how various people cope with every parent’s worst nightmare – that their child is missing … or even murdered.  Some husbands and wives separate or divorce due to the stress.  Some couples remain together but live almost parallel lives, tiptoeing around the subject as if walking on eggshells.  Some file away every photograph and memento, unable to bear the reminders; some, like Sis Pruitt in the novel, keep their child “alive” by becoming advocates for parents of missing/murdered children and telling and re-telling their stories.

Colin St. Claire is an entirely different breed.  Kirk Curnutt paints this main character as the “Ahab of the interstates,” a man in search of his child’s abductor.  St. Claire travels the country following leads, like a tornado hunter follows the path of an incoming storm.  St. Claire is both brilliant and manic, qualities magnified by his drug use, lack of sleep, and outright obsession.

Bob Heim is something of a co-dependent to St. Claire.  Having worked as a P.I. on the case of A.J.’s disappearance, Heim is drawn to follow the shaky trail St. Claire leaves in his wake, hoping for resolution despite the danger to him and his family.

St. Claire, Pruitt and Heim share equal weight in the novel; a tripod to balance and support the burden of the heavy themes.

Kirk Curnutt is a talented and engaging storyteller.  I read Breathing Out the Ghost in two long sittings over a weekend; if it weren’t for having to tend to the needs of my own family, I would have read straight through to follow the stories of these families. 

I’ll quote a few sections from the beginning of the novel, to give you a sense of Curnutt’s writing style.  He “gets into the head” of each of his characters as well as he does Sis Pruitt in this scene, which also gives a hint to the origin of the book’s title:

What had being the parent of a murdered child taught her?  Nothing – nothing except the inexhaustibility of her own anger, anger at constantly being reminded of what she’d lived through, what she’d always be living through, and most of all anger at the presumption that she should be over it, that she should have proved that life goes on, if not for her sake than for the sake of those around her.  That was never the hard part … Life went on anyway, whether you wanted it to or not.  The hard part was being left behind to breathe out the ghost of the one who’d gone on.

He uses metaphor to his advantage; employing not only the obvious and direct connection between Colin St. Claire’s quest and Ahab’s, but using more subtle language as well.  Take, for example, this scene early on, when St. Claire is reviewing his notes in a diner:

Gazing into the tangle of lines he realized the cracks in the tabletop were visible through the tracing paper.  They reminded him of all the interstates on all the abandoned maps he’d studied and then driven, the blue veins of I-75 running toward Saginaw and Flint, the red arterial highways, 46 and 52, carrying oxygen from the heart of the state, keeping his hope fed.

Even as St. Claire descends deeper and deeper into his obsession-fueled madness, Curnutt allowed his intelligence and insight to shine.  His madness, after all, was rooted in love for his missing son.  Here he observes Sis’ visceral reaction to semantics:

“… for you, it’s important to note the difference, to let people know that it was done to her.  To die, that’s an action verb.  The subject of the sentence is the agent of the predicate.  You don’t like it said that way because it negates the truth:  she was acted upon.  But people don’t want to say ‘she was murdered’ because that’s a reminder of how subject we are to randomness, to a sudden convergence of things we can’t control.”

Breathing Out the Ghost contains sections that were difficult for me to read due to their sensitive subject matter, namely sexual abuse and references to murder of children.  Frankly, it is a credit to Curnutt’s skill as a writer that I wanted to read those disturbing scenes.  Be assured, the graphic passages are impactful, yet few and brief.  The focus of the novel is on the parents’ narrative, not the children’s.

References to cell phones set the novel in the present; references to place names set parts of it in a specific midwest farming community.  But this story could be told at any time, in any place.  Curnutt’s insight into the human condition is astounding.

I looked up the definition of “noir thriller” as it appears on the book jacket’s inside flap; it mean “modernist pessimism.”  Breathing Out the Ghost  has it all – intriguing plot, well-developed characters, action and suspense, realistic dialogue; balanced nicely and used appropriately.  I don’t think it’s a pessimistic view, I believe it’s a very brave and deftly well-written novel reflecting the lives of a sad, but real, and perhaps unacknowledged, segment of our population.  I recommend the book as a peek into another world.

Breathing Out the Ghost has won many awards, including a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher’s Award (IPPY) for literary fiction.  A discussion group guide is available at the publisher’s website (don’t read it until you’ve read the book!).  More information about Kirk Curnutt and his other writings can be found here.  I reviewed Breathing Out the Ghost as part of Kirk’s TLC Book Tour.

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