- Hardcover: 560 pages
- Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (July 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 037540791X
- ISBN-13: 978-0375407918
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 16 x 4.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Everything You Need
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Everything You Need, the new novel by Scottish writer AL Kennedy, is the story of Nathan Staples, a self-sabotaging, depleted novelist who lives in a writer's colony where he dreams of reunion with his estranged wife, Maura, and his daughter, Mary, who he's not seen for 15 years. Nathan contrives to have Mary, now 19, invited to join the colony where he can mentor her literary progress without telling her who he is. Mary, an independent and open young woman, has been lovingly raised by an extraordinary gay couple and is more than able to withstand Nathan's bullying irascibility and possessive, confused desire. Kennedy brilliantly teases out the dilemmas and dramas of his subterfuge as he attempts to redeem himself. Nathan, Mary and the five other writers are beautifully drawn and their claustrophobic reliance on each other is touching, cruel and true. Kennedy has a delightful ability to stretch words to new effect. The expressive tenderness in her handling of love, loss and recovery is robust, bracing and sometimes quaint. As Nathan teaches Mary how to avoid his mistakes, how to welcome "the anxious flex of ready words", Kennedy is clever to steer clear of the hackneyed dangers of author-prodigy dynamics and swerves into murkier emotional scapes. Despite a baggy middle and an underwriting of Maura, this is a splendid epic tale of the tricky and terrifying demands of love and of writing itself. --Cherry Smyth
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Nathan Staples is a man in pain, consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated and appalled by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion to his estranged wife, Maura, and their teenage daughter, Mary—whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he’s dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and of becoming whole and complete and alive again.
The path to grace, though, is strewn with obstacles and challenges. The obsessive island dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan’s editor, only friend and one link with his literary career—the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack—is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary is torn emotionally between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond.
With her new novel, A. L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius—its surface bright with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant examination of human frailty, cut through with bitter, helpless comedy and agonizing grief, Everything You Need is a novel about a man who has nothing, a man who will be healed only when he finds the lost grail he once held in his hands: the ability to give and receive love.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you believed the reviews on the back cover you would conclude that this book is the best thing since sliced bread. It's the third of Kennedy's novels I have read and I have been methodical enough to read them in chronological order. I have noticed two things. Each one is longer than the last. The first seemed more autobiographical than the later ones, though I have no way of proving that. The second was least based on the author's own experiences, since she could not have been a tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber during World War Two. And the third, since it deals with writers and writing, is again closer to the writer's experience, though that does not mean it is autobiographical. But despite their many differences each deals with people who have trouble with their emotions and, as a result, are often inarticulate, failing to rise to the verbal occasion and resorting to small-talk or silence as a way out.
While there were good reasons for Day (in the novel of that name) to be tongue-tied, the `hero' of this book, Jonathan Staples is a novelist, a word-smith who ought to be able to communicate with others better than he does. But he has a problem. He still loves the wife who had called time on their marriage many years before and, in so doing, deprived him of their daughter by telling her he is dead. He now lives on Foal Island, a writer's retreat, where his daughter comes to improve her writing skills with her own father as her tutor, a fact of which she is unaware. He should tell her but years pass and he does not. The implication is that the manuscript he gives her to read at the end of the book will do his talking for him.
After his separation from his wife, Jonathan Staples turns to crime writing, so there are passing references to violent acts typical of the genre. But at heart he is a writer of literary fiction which his editor, J D Grace, encourages him to take up again. As it happens this same editor, following his inclination for submission, allows a dominant male (literally) to remove his molars one by one in payment for BDSM sessions. So we have violence here too. And the fact that Staples writes crime novels opens the door to a question: is literary fiction intrinsically superior to genre fiction? Is the Booker Prize a better guide to quality than the Golden Dagger? I believe the answer is no, though it easy to find bad examples in each category. In the UK alone, 600 crime novels are published each year, so many will be run-of-the-mill. But the best crime writers report a good deal about society and how the mind works, and a select few use language every bit as well as their literary equivalents.
I found this literary novel tedious for several reasons. Jonathan Staples is a romantic so, like Polynesians faced with Romeo and Juliet, I find both his emotions and behaviour ridiculous. The second concerns the frequent references to writers and writing as if we were dealing with an aspect of religion rather than a craft. The third concerns sex. If I wanted to read a manual on biological plumbing I could choose to do so though, to be fair, there are more references to it than actual occurrences. On the plus side, the book is improved by a likable dog.
While there were good reasons for Day (in the novel of that name) to be tongue-tied, the `hero' of this book, Jonathan Staples is a novelist, a word-smith who ought to be able to communicate with others better than he does. But he has a problem. He still loves the wife who had called time on their marriage many years before and, in so doing, deprived him of their daughter by telling her he is dead. He now lives on Foal Island, a writer's retreat, where his daughter comes to improve her writing skills with her own father as her tutor, a fact of which she is unaware. He should tell her but years pass and he does not. The implication is that the manuscript he gives her to read at the end of the book will do his talking for him.
After his separation from his wife, Jonathan Staples turns to crime writing, so there are passing references to violent acts typical of the genre. But at heart he is a writer of literary fiction which his editor, J D Grace, encourages him to take up again. As it happens this same editor, following his inclination for submission, allows a dominant male (literally) to remove his molars one by one in payment for BDSM sessions. So we have violence here too. And the fact that Staples writes crime novels opens the door to a question: is literary fiction intrinsically superior to genre fiction? Is the Booker Prize a better guide to quality than the Golden Dagger? I believe the answer is no, though it easy to find bad examples in each category. In the UK alone, 600 crime novels are published each year, so many will be run-of-the-mill. But the best crime writers report a good deal about society and how the mind works, and a select few use language every bit as well as their literary equivalents.
I found this literary novel tedious for several reasons. Jonathan Staples is a romantic so, like Polynesians faced with Romeo and Juliet, I find both his emotions and behaviour ridiculous. The second concerns the frequent references to writers and writing as if we were dealing with an aspect of religion rather than a craft. The third concerns sex. If I wanted to read a manual on biological plumbing I could choose to do so though, to be fair, there are more references to it than actual occurrences. On the plus side, the book is improved by a likable dog.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
With her latest novel ALKennedy moves into exploring the emotional silences we maintain that prevent so many relationships from fulfilling their potential.
Kennedy carefully weaves a number of separate short stories , which stand alone in the novel as well as acting as sequential chapters. Each "story" deals with the continuing theme of love denied or lost but from a different point of view.
The main protagonist, Nathan Staples, is an astonishingly painful portrayal of a middle-aged father who has made the decision to deny his love for his daughter in favour of maintaining the illusion of approval from his ex-wife for his actions. It is a decision ladened with an appalling emotional price.
In addition to the traditional triangular tangle between mother (who is largely absent in the writing) father and daughter, is a not so subtle underscoring of the price of becoming a writer, which the father is, and the daughter hopes to become. At times the plot is overstrained as father and daughter share increasing intimacy both through work and friendship. Credulity is stretched as we wonder how the daughter cannot know it is her own father she is dealing with. And yet how many secrets do each of us carry around successfully to survive?
Kennedy draws heavily on her own experiences to condemn the current publishing culture which burns out talent and crucifies the publishers themselves. Her bitterest comments are reserved for the seeming lottery which calls itself the authors prizes.
The writing is the typical mix of ALK's intelligent ambiguity: robust,rude,sensitive,insightful, sentimental and searing. She can do it all and still walk away with a unique voice that catches our unspoken fears in a way that few authors can.
This is easily her most powerful work to date and should be read by anyone who has lost a child through marriage, or has lost a loved one. The insights into the pain involved are both helpful and terrifyingly accurate.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Another reviewer referred to a 'baggy middle', but this book rewards persistence in the reader.Perhaps it's the unattractiveness of the main character, or the delayed resolution that makes this book hard to stick with,but the experience of reading this book is all the better for it.As others have noted about her writing, it is beautifully observed, but what engaged this reader ultimately was not so much the intellectual properties as the affective impact.
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