It can be a great pleasure to read a novel told in suicide notes. The letters in the case of Michael Kimball’s new novel are written by Jonathan Bender, a good-hearted weatherman with a well-documented case of Major Depressive Disorder. Bender has spent his final days on Earth writing not only to everyone he ever met—his mother, father, brother, elementary-school classmates, college girlfriends, former employers, landlords, and ex-wife—but also to Santa Claus, the Greater Lansing Herald want ads, the state of Michigan, the building where he went to high school, and “Michael J. Fox or Alex P. Keaton.” (“I mean, we were supposed to be about the same age,” he writes in that note,  “so how could our lives be so different?”)

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—Drew Nellins