Everything You Need
By A.L. Kennedy
Knopf, 550 pages, $25.95
A. L. Kennedy is one of the brightest sparks in the firmament of young Scottish novelists, and her new novel, “Everything You Need,” marks her most-ambitious work so far. Kennedy already has four literary prizes to her name and a well-earned place in the list of 20 young British novelists earmarked for their promise by Britain’s trend-setting Granta Magazine.
Not too surprisingly, then, “Everything You Need” turns out to be a protracted meditation on the trials of sustaining a literary life. It also traces the difficult reunion of two writers, father and daughter, who have not met since the daughter was a child.
The daughter, Mary Lamb, has been raised by two fond Welsh “uncles,” Bryn and Morgan. Bryn is her uncle by blood, and it was to Bryn, her mother’s brother, that Mary’s mother consigned her young daughter when she fled her claustrophobic marriage to Nathan Staples, a successful novelist consumed with his work. Despite this unpromising start to Mary’s life, Bryn and his partner, Morgan, have proved a nourishing parental couple, loving of each other and of Mary. Kennedy paints the family life of this unusual triangle with conviction. These are the tenderest pages of “Everything You Need.”
Mary, now grown and on the verge of a first love affair, is ready to leave the nest. During childhood and adolescence, she has not re-encountered her mother and knows nothing of her father, neither his fame as a writer nor even his name, only that he — according to her mother — is dead. Although ignorant of her heritage, Mary has gravitated toward writing. She has shown talent and been chosen for an internship offered by a mysterious organization known only as The Fellowship.
The Fellowship is less a writing school than a tiny community of half-a-dozen writers living on an island off the coast of Wales. The successful applicant (it’s not clear that there has been one before Mary, because the mechanics of this barely plausible writing fellowship form one of the hazier aspects of Kennedy’s novel) must commit herself to seven years of mentoring at the hands of one of these writers. In Mary’s case the mentoring will come — surprise, surprise — from the most-celebrated member of The Fellowship, Nathan Staples. Nathan, riven by disease, creative exhaustion, habitual self-disgust and an insatiable, remorseful longing for the family he lost, is well aware that Mary is his daughter. Mary has no idea.
“Everything You Need” takes us, year by year, across more than 500 pages, through her apprenticeship to her father, toward the moment of impending recognition that their devotion to each other — by now as fiercely tested in the fires of love and hate as any parental bond-springs from more than a common vocation.
Readers familiar with Kennedy’s earlier novel, “Original Bliss,” a deliciously quirky tale of the romance between a middle-age British housewife and a self-help guru who himself needs help with his obsessive inhibitions about self-abuse, will recognize the pattern of this journey as characteristic of her fiction: two individuals making their painful way toward each other across obstacles of temperament and circumstance. Kennedy’s favorite topic, as ever, is self-loathing, and once again an underlying, life-affirming tide brings the ship of tortured souls to port, for a happy — even a sentimental — ending.
“Original Bliss” is a notably short book that closes swiftly before its mixture of the bizarre and the engaging can pall. By contrast, “Everything You Need” seeks to tell us everything we need to know and, alas, more about the inside of its characters’ heads, especially the rambling cadences of mortified self-regard that form Nathan’s inner life.
Our acquaintance with him begins with his drawn-out attempt to hang himself and continues throughout the book in long, italicized streams of self-reproach, which veer into italic bold print when italics are not interior enough. Nathan’s fame as a writer derives, we gather, from a species of highbrow pulp fiction, violence with a veneer of sophistication. Disappointingly, the reader is given no examples of this, although we do read snatches of Nathan’s memoirs, which inevitably resemble his self-absorbed interior monologues. Should he or should he not tell Mary, his gifted intern, that he is her father? Hundreds of pages pass as Nathan states and restates this question. Meanwhile, “Everything You Need” notes the milestones in his daughter’s development from talented beginner to acclaimed young author, yet we get no glimpse or insight into Mary’s prose either. For a book so focused on the writing life, “Everything You Need” remains cagey about the mysteries of the craft.
The other members of The Fellowship, under the leadership of its elderly chairman, Joe Christopher, a gentle fellow with a saintly cast of mind and exotic adventures to look back on, are a suitably assorted bunch who never threaten to rival Nathan and Mary for our interest. They share, in a loose fashion, their leader’s ideal of a series of revelatory, life — endangering encounters — not necessarily suicide bids, but close shaves with death.
Seven of these narrow escapes is the notional total a writer needs to achieve spiritual freedom, according to Chairman Joe. It’s a shame the novel doesn’t embrace this idea with more gusto, but as with so much of the mysterious Fellowship, Kennedy doesn’t seem sure whether to follow through with it or not.
Her hesitancy is understandable. Over “Everything You Need” and its damp Welsh island hangs the uneasy example of the mysterious island Fellowship in an earlier, best-selling British novel, John Fowles’ “The Magus,” once widely read but haunted by the implausibility of its narcissistic premise, that of a young man chosen for a rite of initiation so elaborate that the entire resources of Twentieth Century Fox would have been hard put to orchestrate it. Kennedy’s book, fixated on repressed yearnings and the inner life, is a shoestring-budget version.
Kennedy’s feel for brimming, frustrated emotion remains her finest weapon as a writer. She also has the all-important gift of an unexpected phrase, and is fearless and thrilling in matters of the flesh: “She closed her eyes,” Kennedy writes of Mary in a typical cadence, “and, in the small pause of dark, watched her need kiss down against him, raw and lipping him to the root.” Her talent deserves every iota of the praise that has been heaped on it. Such praise is a double-edged sword, however, and the unweeded repetitiveness of “Everything You Need” reads like a cry for help, or at least for an editor not awed by Kennedy’s rising fame. Sadly, its self-indulgence drains from this novel everything that is singular and fresh, rendering it — and here, alas, is the unkindest cut of all for a writer acclaimed as an original — distinctively passe. Prolonged contemplation of interior squalor was a mid-century genre graced only by Beckett’s ever terser and more savagely comical glimpses.
Yet there is comedy, too, in “Everything You Need,” above all in the coyly seedy middle-age machismo of Nathan’s relationship with his once-raffish London agent, Jack Grace, who is now merely a parody of literary decadence, more saloon bar than salon. These two — ill, drunk, cynical and precariously well-to-do — are captured with gruesome accuracy. For its portrait of this ghastly twosome alone, readers not yet familiar with Kennedy’s rich and often brave work should seek out this book, despite its extravagance. Certainly those not daunted by a riot of navel-gazing will not need to shrink from “Everything You Need.”
