Iodine Book

Trace Pennington is a senior at the top of her class at the University of the Midwest, a double major in English and classics with an intimidating quadruple minor in psychology, humanities, philosophy, and (after one more class) women's studies. But when she came to school, she turned down the room-and-board part of her scholarship, preferring to do her studying in the run-down, unheated farmhouse where she lives with her father's dog and two hundred unlabeled file folders. No one, not even her lifelong best friend, knows her address. She's not even enrolled under her real name. What Trace is hiding from, however, she is also trapped with: herself, mental illness, memory, reality.
Kimmel's prose, both in her memoirs ("A Girl Named Zippy") and previous novels ("The Solace of Leaving Early"), has always been lovely; here, it reaches a chilling beauty. She handles two concurrent narratives: Trace's revelatory jottings in a dream journal for one of her classes (the invitation-only seminar Special Topics in Archetypical Psychology) and her third-person movements through several different worlds: the rural bleakness of her childhood, the posing personae of college kids, the jargon-laced farce of academia, and always, the dark, bristling territory of dreams. The characterization is usually painful and often funny'a cover blurb compares Kimmel to Flannery O'Connor, and they do share the ability to portray people who at once hopelessly cliched and completely individual. Many of the cast of "Iodine" have, in fact, consciously turned themselves into stereotypes, both funny and heartbreaking: the overwrought transsexual, the obese, paranormal-obsessed trailer-wife, the rumpled, past-his-prime professor exiled to a third-rate university. Archetypes, after all, are just caricatures on a sublime scale. And archetypes are where this novel dwells, within the Jungian corridors of the collective unconscious, where Trace's hallucinations (the coyote walking upright who, when she was six, put a pebble in the back of her neck and led her over the hillside to where her best friend was waiting) are every bit as real as her abusive mother and her too-beloved father. While bits and pieces of Trace's past are revealed, as the line between author and narrator all but disappears, it's impossible'and pointless'to tell what really happened.
Why iodine? It's referenced only twice, once within a delusion, but as the title it's at the back of the reader's mind throughout: it represents, I think, the attempt to heal, imposed from without'helpful but superficial, leaving behind a stain.