Everything You Need: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Kennedy, A. L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375707476 ISBN 13: 9780375707476

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2002

Synopsis

From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love's paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt for humanity is surpassed only by his corrosive self-loathing. Along with five equally dysfunctional colleagues Nathan lives on an island retreat off the coast of Wales, where he yearns for the daughter he lost years before. Now, in defiance of all his hopes, Mary Lamb-herself an aspiring writer-is about to join him as the seventh member of the colony.

As Nathan tortuously wins the trust of the child who has no inkling of their true relationship, Mary comes to a gradual understanding of her gift. In Everything You Need, A. L. Kennedy combines the mythic resonance of Arthurian legend with a sensibility as lyrical as it is profane.

About this title

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

Review:

"Gorgeous and visceral . . . profound, tender . . . [Kennedy's] most accomplished work to date." --The Wall Street Journal

"Kennedy is as disconcertingly accurate at tenderness as at wildness. . . . A passionate writer, on the edge and at risk." --The New York Times Book Review

"A virtuoso of prose. Her phrasing is fine-tuned and supple to the highest degree: intuitive and subtle about the multifarious sensations of being alive." -London Review of Books

"To read Kennedy is to be captivated by an elegant, idiosyncratic intelligence at work." --Elle

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375707476
• ISBN 13: 9780375707476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560