"I am bad. A bad, bad man," Willy Muller tells us, and on first evidence the reader might be inclined to agree. A suspected murderer and a confirmed hack, the protagonist of Everything You Know is a Hollywood-style bottom feeder with no evident sense of shame. In London, years ago, Willy went to prison for killing his wife. Once released on appeal, he alienated his few remaining friends by writing a tell-all memoir of his married life before making the natural progression to churning out second-rate "sleb" bios. ("The crap just bubbles out of me, uncorrupted," Willy muses, half proud, half appalled. "Bad writing is my gift.") Did Willy kill his wife? Or did she hit her head in a fall? Either way, he is still alarmingly full of bile, raging against a world populated by "malignant dwarfs," "trolls," and "lipsticked ferrets." When his daughter kills herself using pills, Willy counts his blessings: after all, "Sadie might have done herself in in any number of vulgar or grotesque ways." The man even calls his dying German mother "Herr Kommandant"--to her face. Temporarily shacked up in Puerto Vallarta with his girlfriend, a cosmetic surgery victim who wears "a perpetual expression of parched exhilaration," Willy takes his rage out on everyone around him, including himself. In fact, he waxes almost loving about his own physical decay--his skin with its "ancient, battered look of fried liver," ears with "a violet tinge at their curly edges, like exotic salad leaves," sagging belly gazing up at him "like an affectionate haggis." There are certainly pleasures to be found in this particular brand of literary nastiness, although Willy does pick some rather large and stationary targets: agents, facelifts, pretentious directors with German accents, and so on. Happily, debut novelist Zoe Heller has something larger in mind than the spectacle of a man savaging everything hateful in reach, and the book undergoes a subtle shift in tone midway through.
The medium is Sadie's diary, delivered to Willy's door four months after her death. Written in a style as straightforward and affecting as Willy's is blustering and cruel, it describes a childhood of Dickensian loneliness and an adult life ruled by a heartbreaking--and unsuccessful--search for love. At first Willy can't read without feeling "terrible, fluttery pains" in his gut. Later, however, the diary elicits what is--at least in Willy's terms--a kind of moral thaw. "Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good. Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around," his accountant tells him, and amazingly, Willy pays heed. (Fortunately, for those of us who have come to enjoy his misanthropy, not too much heed; to the bitter end, he can't help noting of his former sister-in-law, "Boy, did her arse get big.") It's a mark of Heller's skill that we never stop caring about Willy, no matter how repulsive he seems; half victim, half perpetrator, half German, half Jew, he muddles through life with a moral passivity that might resemble our own. Everything You Know is a sharp, stylish, and wickedly funny first novel, but like its hero, it has real sadness concealed underneath. --Mary Park
From Library Journal
This debut novel offers a bleak portrait of an Englishman named Willy Muller who is convicted of killing his alcoholic wife and whose memoir of the event makes him notorious. After his release from prison, Willy begins a series of ghost-writing jobs in Los Angeles, where he follows a maudlin, self-depreciating life style that results in a heart attack. While recuperating, he reads the journal of daughter Sadie, one of his two children, who was abandoned as a child and who as an adult committed suicide. Eventually, Willy comes to understand his own responsibility for the abject neglect that blighted his daughters' lives and seems determined to make amends by getting involved in the life of Sadie's illegitimate daughter. The plot is choppy and the characters are shallowly developed, with little to endear them to the reader. Willy's final contrition seems dramatically out of character and simply a narrative device to tie together a dreary tale of modern squalor. Not recommended for most collections.ADavid A. Beron?, Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Hellers first is a smart take on hoary subjectsJewish deracination, the moral vileness of Hollywoodthat nevertheless offers real pleasures and marks the writer as one to watch. Willy Muller has a lot on his plate, but all of it is bitter food. He was a journalist on British television until something ghastly happened back in 1971: his alcoholic and fiercely unhappy wife, in a drunken argument, slipped, hit her head on the fridge, and died. Thus Willy was not only left with his two young daughters, Sophie and Sadie, but his TV career ended fast when the tabloids exploited him as a wife murderer who got off easy. Things were made no betterexcept financiallywhen Willy published a hugely successful memoir (To Have and to Hold) revealing everything about his marriage but exonerating himself. Was it honest? Well, ten years later Sophies confusion, doubt, and rage about her father have driven her to sex, drugs, and a miserably shabby marriage, while the younger Sadie, though not married, has had a baby of her ownand has just committed suicide. Imagine the torment Willy goes through (he now lives in L.A.) as he reads through Sadies journals, wrestles with his guilt, and tries to make a grotesquely distorted screenplay of To Have and to Hold for the sleazy movie moguls who see a sure killing in it. Toss in a heart attack, an attempt to quit smoking, plenty of troubles on the sexual front, and a trip to Mexico to write that brings Willy face to face with the rich, glib, hyper-Teutonic Hans Stempel, director-to-be of the new movieand one of the catalysts that suddenly turns the half-Jewish Willy completely around and sends him back to England to tryone way or anotherto do things over again. Willys caustic, witty voice (cockroaches walk around like ambulatory patent leather handbags) keeps his mournful tale sturdily on course and safely protected from the maudlin. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A sparkling first novel...As affecting as it is amusing. Using her quick journalistic eye, Ms. Heller effortlessly conjurs up the disparate worlds Willy has traversed in ... while introducing us to a Waugh-like cast of misfits, hustlers and losers, all delineated with Swiftean malice and glee....Her keen eye for the telling detail, her pitch-perfect ear for the lunacies of contemporary speech, her knack for capturing the subtext of hope and memory and regret that informs so many familial exchanges -- all combine to make a stylish and spirited debut." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Sharp and feisty debut novel from one of the most promising journalists of her generation...This is a riotous read." -- Tatler, London
Everything You Know is an acerbic, sneakily touching novel about the rehabilitation of a monster. At its best, it calls to mind Martin Amis's phosphorescently nasty oeuvre. -- The New York Times Book Review, Jeff Giles
From the Publisher
"A smashing success...Wickedly funny, lively and--ultimately--moving. Her ability to engage us with a reprehensible, mercilessly biting man [is] a wonder."
Heller McAlpin, Newsday"An acerbic, sneakily touching novel...Heller may be an assiduously unsentimental novelist, but she knows where the heartstrings are when she needs them...She can be nimble, hilarious. She has a shrewd ear for dialogue and conjures a terrific cast of supporting characters."
-- Jeff Giles, New York Times
"Delightfully black-hearted...Not since Flannery O' Connor has a woman writer come along who seems to so thoroughly understand the greasy inner cogs of the male psyche, especially where matters of sex are concerned."
-- Jim Haner, Baltimore Sun
"A splendid ventriloquist...Her treatment is usually light and assured--and often extremely funny...Above all, Everything You Know is a highly accomplished first novel, suggesting even better things to come."
-- Wayne Daniels, Boston Book Review
From the Inside Flap
Willy Muller is an embittered writer of celebrity bios and an equal-opportunity misanthropist. At the age of fifty, he has survived imprisonment for murdering his wife, years of venomous hate mail from the British public and, most recently, the suicide of his daughter Sadie. Willy needs a rest, but he's not going to get it. While recuperating from a heart attack in a Mexican resort with his magnificently silly girlfriend Penny and his vodka-drenched friend Harry, Willy finds himself drawn into a troubling confrontation with his past. He should be working on the screen adaptation of his infamous hack memoir, To Have and to Hold, but instead he becomes engrossed in Sadie's tragic diaries. Reluctantly, he considers his chaotic family history and the notion that "only when you die do you run out of chances to be good."
Set in Mexico, Los Angeles and London, Everything You Know is a story of love and loathing, sex and death, and filial relations gone horribly awry. Acidly funny and deeply affecting, it marks the debut of a brilliant and immensely stylish young writer.
About the Author
Zoe Heller was born in London and educated at Oxford and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn and Pennsylvania. This is her first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This afternoon, as I came awake from one of those thin, un-refreshing hospital naps, a strange woman was standing over my bed. She was unusually tall -- maybe six foot -- with a sad, too-long face and a wonky right eye.
"Mr. Muller?" she said. "I hope I didn't disturb you. My name is Vivian Champ. I'm a post-trauma counsellor."
I shifted slightly, dragging my body up towards the headboard and causing a gust of fuggy air to rise up from the sheets. Vivian's right eye veered about like a restless marble, making her left eye seem peculiarly still and glaring.
"Are you going to give me a bath?" I asked her. (Bathing is a rare and exotic privilege in the modern American hospital regime. In the entire fortnight I have been at the Beverly Memorial, I have been steadfastly refused anything more than a once-a-day wash-down with a chemically moistened cotton-nylon napkin.)
Vivian cocked her head and laughed a tinkling, girlish laugh. "No, Mr. Muller. I'm just here for a chat. How are you feeling?"
There was a short silence while I riffled through a selection of nasty responses and decided, finally, that I couldn't be bothered with any of them.
"I've brought something you might want to listen to," Vivian said when it had become clear that I was not going to reply. She produced a cassette tape from her handbag. On its cover there was a line-drawing of two hippy types sitting cross-legged, with their eyes closed. The title of the cassette was Meditation Chants and Prayers for the Sick.
"What about a cigarette?" I asked. Vivian smiled at me tolerantly. She wasn't going to be provoked. Smoking is the ultimate no-no here. They'd sooner you shot heroin -- they'd sooner you had a bath -- than that you partook of tobacco. Early on in my stay, I made a big stink about the no-smoking thing. I threatened a hunger strike. I yelled and made my eyes roll back in my head. I reduced two nurses to tears. But none of this got me a smoke. They're hard bastards, these medical people.
"I don't have anything to play it on," I told Vivian, gesturing at her tape.
"Don't worry," she said. "I can arrange a Walkman for you." She bit at her lips, allowing me a glimpse of her mottled teeth.
"Thank you," I said, "but I'm not interested."
"Why is that?" Her right eyeball seemed to become more agitated.
"What do you mean, why?" There was a nervous defiance in her tone that I meant to squash. "I'm just not interested. I want a bath."
She nodded thoughtfully. "I sense a lot of anger from you. What do you think you are angry about?"
"Look," I said with a high, fake laugh. "I appreciate what you're trying to do for me, but I don't want the tape."
She nodded again. "You know, you've been through a very difficult experience. Your main enemy now is stress."
I had had enough of this ugly person. "No," I said. "No. My main enemy now is you."
Vivian stiffened and blinked. "This is obviously not a good time," she said. She put the tape down on my bedside table. "I'll leave this here for you in case you change your mind." Then she turned and left. I watched the great, fleshy pistons of her buttocks chug lazily up and down in her nylon slacks as she loped from the room.
Depression and irritability are common symptoms among cardiac patients. My doctor told me so the other day, after I had thrown a stale bagel at one of the Asian trolls who bring me my breakfast. Naturally, I resented his banal diagnosis. Maybe this has nothing to do with my heart! I wanted to shout at him. Maybe I'm having a nervous breakdown!
* * * * * * * * *
All summer I have been feeling fretful, off-kilter -- lurching back and forth between deathly exhaustion and manic energy. Work has been a big problem. My pending task is to write the autobiography of Reginald Boon, former king of daytime television. But last year, shortly before I signed on for the Reg work, my agent managed to sell some producer the film option on my memoir, To Have and to Hold, for fifteen grand. And then, when the project got taken on by Curzon Studios, he got me hired to write the screenplay for another twenty. This was a pretty good haul for a book that's been sold five times over in the last eight years and a screenplay that, unbeknownst to the studio, has been sitting in my desk drawer for just as long. But thirty-five thousand dollars, when you come down to it, is a most unsatisfactory sum -- not nearly enough to allow me to turn down the Boon project and just sufficient to discourage me from doing any work on it. The first draft of Boon was due two months ago, at the beginning of July. Since June, cushioned by my ill-gotten and rapidly dwindling gains, I have been stuck, revving helplessly, on the tenth sentence of Chapter One. I cannot write a single word. No, that's not true. I can write endless, scabrous fantasies about Boon's family and friends. I can compose scads of pornographic limericks about his boyhood in Idaho. I just can't produce the lighthearted, anecdotal look at the life and times of one of TV-land's greats that is required. Most days, this summer, I have spent collapsed on my sofa, flicking through furniture catalogues and eating cream cheese straight from the tub.
Then there was the other thing. One morning, two weeks ago, shortly after I had returned from breakfast at the local mall, I received a parcel in the mail from my youngest daughter, Sadie. This was an odd occurrence, because Sadie had not communicated with me -- postally or otherwise -- for many years. Also, she had been dead for approximately four months.
She died this past May. She killed herself with Mogadons and paracetamols mashed up in Bailey's Irish Cream. A neighbour had been looking after her baby daughter, Pearl, for the night, and when this woman came round the next day to drop the child off, she looked through the letterbox and saw Sadie's blueish leg jutting out from the kitchen onto the hallway lino. Four days afterwards, Sadie was in the ground, buried next to her mother in Highgate Cemetery.
The family made it clear I was not welcome at the funeral, which was fine by me -- I wasn't so crazy to attend in any case. (My sister, Monika, rang later to tell me how it went, and apparently the man who did the service referred to Sadie throughout as "Sody.") Pearl, now an orphan (her father having absconded shortly after her conception), has been taken to live with her great-aunt Margaret in the north of England.
If I am sounding lachrymose or self-pitying, I apologize. The last thing I want to do is whine. Since it happened, I have been busy as a bee, calculating my blessings and registering all the small mercies that were afforded in this instance. Sadie might have done herself in in any number of vulgar or grotesque ways. She might have been a jumper. Or a slasher. She might have hanged herself from a light fixture after listening to Satanic messages in pop songs played backwards. As it was, she merely mixed herself a muddy cocktail using a plastic pestle and mortar borrowed from her daughter's Little Miss Chef set. So, lest there be any confusion, let me acknowledge right here: It Could Have Been Worse.
The address on Sadie's parcel had the wrong postcode, and the postmark was blurred. Judging from the proliferation of scribbled emendations covering the parcel's brown paper, it had been on a brutal odyssey through the California postal system. Luckily, I had never seen Sadie's adult handwriting before, so I didn't realize straight away that the parcel was from her, and I was saved from having a freak-out in front of the postman. My first thought, as I stood there at the door signing for it, was that I had been sent a bomb. I experienced a brief, Technicolor vision of exploding fertilizer, raining nails, costly facial reconstruction. And then I saw British stamps, and relaxed. Oh, I thought. Just hate mail.
I have been receiving tokens of animosity through the post for eleven years, ever since I was first accused of killing my wife, Oona. In 1970, during a marital spat, Oona broke her skull on a refrigerator door handle and died. I was subsequently convicted of manslaughter and spent a short time in prison before being found innocent on appeal. The hate mail comes, as one might expect, from people who approved of the first verdict and were disappointed by the second. Mostly, it is frothy-mouthed, green-ink rants from ladies in Hemel Hempstead. But every now and then I receive oozy, suppurating objects -- animal organs, bodily excretions, et cetera. For several months back in 1973, someone in west London express-mailed me a weekly lump of human shit -- his or her own, presumably -- each one tremulously wrapped in cling-film and silver foil. For five years or so another anonymous enemy kept up a monthly consignment of offal. And there is one tenacious individual who, for nearly a decade now, has specialized in soiled sanitary towels and crumpled paper handkerchiefs caked with snot. I have no strong evidence, but a vibration tells me that the individual in question is my wife's younger sister, Margaret -- the one who now has charge of Pearl.
Margaret has always hated me. When Oona and I were newlyweds and Margaret was still a social-work student, she used to come and stay with us in London. She would sit knitting in corners, playing the snide country mouse -- "Shop-bought flowers! How grand!" -- and moaning about the fact that she couldn't get laid. Later, she press-ganged Bill into marrying her, and the two of them went to live in righteous poverty on the outskirts of Leeds. Oona and I once went to visit them on our way to Scotland. Bill made us macaroni cheese for dinner, and afterwards we all had to do the washing-up together while Margaret and Bill sang "Green Grow the Rushes-o" ...
