Everything You Know: A Novel
By Zoe Heller
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Zoë Heller's first novel introduces an unforgettable curmudgeon, Willy Muller, an embittered journalist turned celebrity biographer and misanthrope. At the age of fifty, having survived imprisonment for murdering his wife, years of venomous hate mail from the public, and most recently, the suicide of his daughter, Sadie, Willy is about to become an unlikely candidate for redemption. With its scalpel-sharp wit and brilliant dialogue, Everything You Know is "a smashing success. Wickedly funny, lively, and---ultimately---moving" (Newsday).
Zoe Heller
Zoë Heller is the author of Everything You Know and What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and made into an acclaimed film starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Heller lives in New York.
Read more from Zoe Heller
Collected Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Believers: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Everything You Know
70 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The snarky brilliant descriptions of people are great, although the characters are mostly either despicable or pathetic.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is truly excellent. I'd give it five stars but Notes on a Scandal got that and it's slightly better. This is very very funny though; sometimes because she's just so horribly honest and sometimes, well, just because it is. I don't think I'll be able to look at my belly again without thinking of it as an affectionate haggis. On the technical front, I thought she very cleverly told us what a bad man he is at the start. Then later, when he's just dreadful, you can't help but identify.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I would have liked this much more if I had read it before Zoe Heller's other, better books, [Notes on a Scandal] and [The Believers], both of which I absolutely loved. This is clearly a first novel: there are hints of brilliance, especially in the dialogue, but it never quite gets where it's going, and the pacing in the beginning is so uneven it was a bit of a slog to get through until they arrived in Mexico. Only for die-hard Heller fans. Check out her other work.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5hollywood screen writer reassesses his relationships/values while reading the diaries of his youngest daughter, who committed suicide;not many of the characters are that likeable, and most are stepping through life with their eyes closed, so a bit depressing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One of those books in which not a great deal happens, but the writing is of such a consistently high standard, as well as being very funny, that it hardly matters. Like Zoe Heller’s other novel ‘Notes on a Scandal’, this features a dislikeable narrator and a lot of sniffy commentary, and aside from a slightly curious ending, I enjoyed it. What I was most impressed by was the creation, by a female author, of a male narrator who is most definitely, unquestionably, a Bloke.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Willy Muller receives the diary of his youngest daughter shortly after she commits suicide. While recovering from a heart attack, he reads them and gains an understanding of the impact he has had on his children.Nothing overwhelming in this book, but a good read nonetheless.
Book preview
Everything You Know - Zoe Heller
1
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
in rounds. To complete the festive evening, we huddled around their crappy black and white television to watch a general-knowledge quiz hosted by some tweedy English mo. As a special treat, Margaret cracked open a family pack of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. That’s what Margaret is like.
Even though the flow of excrement and other anti-gifts has slacked off somewhat in recent years, I still keep a stock of latex gloves in the kitchen for disposing of the odd Valentine’s pig-heart or yuletide phial of vomit. And it was to the kitchen that I went on this occasion, bearing the package gingerly before me. I quickly located the gloves container at the back of a drawer, peeled off a pair and snapped them on. Then I took a knife from the magnetic rack on the wall and began carefully to slice the package open.
Inside, I found three scruffy, ring-bound writing pads and a large white envelope labelled For Pearl.
I sat down, aware that my breathing had become humiliatingly shallow and rapid. Then I opened the envelope and shook out its contents. They were:
a lock of blond baby hair
a plain silver ring, inscribed with the words For SM with love, MM
a pair of baby bootees
When Sadie died, she did not leave any letters or notes or lipstick scrawls on mirrors to tell everyone why she’d done it. Just herself, palely loitering on her dirty kitchen floor. The absence of any accompanying gloss was a great disappointment to my wife’s family. They felt, apparently, that Sadie’s omission had denied them closure.
Personally, I was relieved. The way most people behave when they know they are about to expire is pretty shabby. It’s always the nastiest tyrants who get taken with a mawkish enthusiasm for coming to terms
as soon as they know they’re going to pop their clogs. Then everyone has to play ball while they lie around in darkened rooms, wheezing fake confessions and clutching their enemies in conciliatory death-cuddles.
I thought Sadie had done exceptionally well to be so efficient and laconic in death. But now, as I trawled through the pathetic items in the envelope, I felt the familiar prickings of parental disappointment. She had, it seemed, succumbed to the sentimentalities of leave-taking after all. And Christ, isn’t life hard enough without that sort of hokey melodrama?
After a while, I opened one of the pads. It appeared to be some rather primitive species of journal. The first page was dated 31 December 1970.
Dear Diary, I read,
Tomorrow is the beginning of the new year and Doctor Hume has told me it is helpful to write down my feelings and ideas, so today I am starting a new tradition. Doctor Hume has yellow hair and green eyes and is quiet gorgeous. Sophie says she fancies him. But first, let me tell you I am nine years old, I have brown hair and brown eyes and my middle name is Sibella after my grandmother on my mums side.
my grandad is called Paul. The other grandad is dead and granny Ursula who is my dads mum lives alone behind sainsburys on finchley road. her flat is quiet pokey and she often gets sad because she needs light. My sister is Sophie and she is thirteen. Her middle name is Monika after my aunt. She is very old for her age and quiet obsessed with boys and clothes. Sometimes she is nice to me and tells me her secrets but quite a lot of the time she is mean and la di da and says o! you wouldn’t understand! we live in chalk farm which is near to dingwalls market. Mum who is called Oona died in September and there is quite a controversy about that. now we live just with dad who is called William Muller. He used to be on television. he reported current affairs for a program called 24/7 but he is not working at the moment because he has alot on his plate. He is not as strict as mum. tonight we are going to stay up and see fireworks and watch Drakyula on the telly because even though it is frightening it is a classic. Dad is under alot of strain because he has to meet with lawyers all the time. It is hard for me to make a judgment about dad because I am in the middle of it all. That is why I am having sessions with doctor Hume.
I put down the book. I would like to be able to describe my feelings at this juncture, but I can’t really remember them. My actions were as follows: I got up from the table. I took off the latex gloves. I wrapped the latex gloves in a plastic bag and threw them in the bin. I went to my bedroom and changed into my tennis gear. I went back into the kitchen. I ate a slice of roast beef from the refrigerator. I left the house and drove to the Santa Monica Tennis Club, where I met Art Mann, my aforementioned agent. We had completed two sets—both of which, despite strong intimations of nausea, I had won—when, at some point shortly after 11 a.m., I had a heart