Mrs. Kimble

Jennifer Haigh reveals charismatic, philandering Ken Kimble by entering the lives of the damaged women who marry him. Martha Plimpton's performance offers an achingly accurate portrait of Birdie, who lives somewhere outside herself in an alcoholic daze, lost and disoriented after Kimble abandons her with two children. As second wife Joan, recovering from a devastating mastectomy, Plimpton is particularly poignant, making Joan's vulnerability to the master manipulator understandable and forgivable. As third wife Dinah, born with a disfiguring birthmark, Plimpton is first grateful, later shocked, as Kimble's duplicity is revealed. Plimpton's performance is top-notch. Her tones are round and soothing, her diction is first-rate, and her attitude as each woman is flawless. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

February 17, 2003
The three women who successively marry Ken Kimble all believe they've found the perfect partner, and all are proven wrong in Haigh's uneven debut. Birdie is a student at a Southern Bible college in the early 1960s when she meets Kimble, then a handsome young choir director; they marry less than a year later, a day before she turns 19. After seven unfaithful years of marriage, Ken walks out on Birdie and their two young children, leaving the hard-drinking Birdie impoverished. Ken next surfaces in Florida in 1969, engaged to a formerly ambitious coed who dropped out of college to travel the country with him. He summarily dumps her to court 39-year-old Joan Cohen, a strong-willed Newsweek
reporter who is recovering from breast cancer surgery. He marries her (after falsely telling her that he's Jewish) and joins her rich uncle in his real estate business. A few years and one miscarriage later, the marriage has quietly soured, and a few years after that Joan has a recurrence of cancer and dies. Ken's third wife is the much-younger Dinah, who used to be his children's baby-sitter. This marriage survives Ken's rise to prominence in Washington, D.C., as the founder of a successful charity. Haigh's women are believable, if a touch clichéd, but Ken is a cipher. Haigh leaves us guessing about his motivations, and his irresistible appeal to these women—especially the tough-minded Joan—also remains murky. The novel has sharply incisive passages, but Haigh's thin characterizations don't quite live up to the promise of the clever, intricate premise. #1 Book Sense selection for March/April; Author tour.