Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Everything You Know

Name: Everything You Know
Author: Zoe Heller
ISBN: 9781250003744

by Zoe Heller

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Overview

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).

About the Author, Zoe Heller

Zoë Heller was born in London and lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), The Believers, and Everything You Know.

Biography

Although Zoe Heller made her initial splash with a series of addictively entertaining "girl about town" columns for Britain's Telegraph and Sunday Times, she has made the transition to literary fiction with a degree of success that can only be called extraordinary.

London-born and Oxford-educated, Heller acquired her M.A. from Columbia University in 1988. After graduate school, she returned to England, where she worked briefly in publishing, then as a journalist, book reviewer, and feature writer for various mainstream British newspapers. In the 1990s, she moved to New York and began chronicling her experiences as a single woman in the Big Apple. Her wry, witty, and outrageously confessional dispatches turned her into a household name in Britain and inspired a wave of Bridget Jones-style journalism that has never matched Heller's signature brio and artistic flair.

Despite the popularity of her columns, Heller began to feel confined by the kind of writing that had made her reputation. In 2000, she plunged into the choppy seas of literary fiction with a darkly comic novel entitled Everything You Know. Although it was savaged by the British press (a sour grapes-induced snubbing and drubbing Heller admits still stings), the book received enthusiastic reviews in the U.S. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it ""A sparkling first novel...As affecting as it is amusing," and the Los Angeles Times called it "... a shrewdly funny portrayal of a first-class curmudgeon."

There was nothing mixed about the reception for Heller's sophomore effort. Released in 2003, Notes on a Scandal (incongruously entitled in the U.S. What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal), was an unqualified success. The story of an obsessive affair between a teacher and her underage student, the novel unfolds in the form of a manuscript written by the teacher's "friend," an embittered older colleague with a few obsessions of her own. The book was shortlisted for Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize, and went on to become an acclaimed, award-winning film starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

Following the success of Notes on a Scandal, Heller gave up her award-winning column, admitting that she was somewhat embarrassed by its egregiously autobiographical content. (In 2005, she told the Independent, "[T]he sound of the barrel being scraped became too resounding.") And while devoted fans still miss her wry, sly, self-deprecating articles, there is no question the literary world has gained a formidable talent. In the words of the American writer Edmund White, "Heller joins the front ranks of British novelists, right up there with Amis and McEwan." Lofty praise for a former Bridget Jones!

Good To Know

On her right shoulder, Heller sports a faded tattoo of a small, green tortoise. "I was 17," she explained in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. "On the Finchley Road. And I was with some boys who were getting naked women, the ace of spades and so on. I wasn't going to get a naked lady and it happened at the time that my favourite animal was a tortoise."

Heller's father, Lukas Heller, wrote Hollywood screenplays (including The Dirty Dozen and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), and her mother was involved in politics, including the Save London Transport campaign.

Some fascinating outtakes from our interview with Zoë Heller:

"My very first job was as a milkman's assistant on an electric milk float in London. (This was in the days when British homeowners got their milk delivered to their front doorsteps.) I was 14 at the time. It was an okay job, but the smell of stale milk tended to linger horribly on my clothes."

"I wish I could have been a jazz singer."

"I have two daughters. One is named Frankie Ray (Frankie after the 12-year-old protagonist of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers; Ray for Ray Charles) The younger one is named Lula Nelson (Lula because we liked it -- and oddly enough it turns out to be the name that Carson McCuller's was given at birth; Nelson for Willie Nelson)."

"I am pathetically without hobbies. I like lying in a hammock with a gin and tonic and a book."

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Sparkling…A Waugh-like cast of misfits, hustlers, and losers, all delineated with Swiftean malice and glee."—-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"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."—-The Baltimore Sun

"Heller many be an assiduously unsentimental novelist, but she knows where the heartstrings are when she needs them. She can be nimble and hilarious. She has a shrewd ear for dialogue and conjures a terrific cast of supporting characters….An acerbic, sneakily touching novel."—-The New York Times Book Review

"A caustic and ultimately devastating novel."—-The New Yorker

"At once biting and sly, hilarious and haunting. A blazingly good debut."—-The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mark Rozzo

Zoe Heller's first novel is a shrewdly funny portrayal of a first-class curmudgeon forced to get in touch with--and atone for--the true jerk within.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jim Haner

With a yellow eye and an unerring ear for the rhythm of words, Heller sets up one such comic gut punch after another in this laugh-out-loud saga of a middle-aged ex-convict turned wastrel Hollywood screenwriter, philanderer and cardiac case.
— Baltimore Sun

John Frederick Moore

In the first seven pages of Zoe Heller's debut novel, Everything You Know, we learn that Willy Muller has suffered a heart attack; that his youngest daughter, Sadie, has committed suicide; and that he still receives hate mail from people who believe he killed his wife more than a decade earlier.

Willy once thrived as a well-regarded British TV journalist, but things fell apart for him after his wife, Oona, slipped and crushed her skull in the kitchen during a drunken argument. He served jail time for murder until the conviction was overturned. Eleven years after being cleared, he remains a vilified public figure (hello, O.J.!), reduced to writing trashy celebrity biographies to make ends meet. His surviving daughter, Sophie, also despises him, lowering herself to make contact only when she needs money to support her drug habit.

Whatever inclination you may have to feel bad for Willy, however, quickly disappears: This is hardly a character who inspires sympathy. After his heart attack, he convalesces in a Puerto Vallarta house supplied by his agent, accompanied by his girlfriend, a Pollyanna who suffers his boorishness with a patience beyond human understanding. Shortly after Oona's death, in an attempt to pay his legal bills, Willy wrote a tell-almost-all memoir; as he relates his tale in Puerto Vallarta, he's struggling to adapt the memoir into a screenplay, despite his awareness of the venture's unseemliness.

That Willy wards off emotion is evident early on. Consider, for example, his declaration of respect for Sadie's manner of suicide:

Sadie might have done herself in in any number of vulgar or grotesque ways...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.

Willy cheerily disdains sentimentality in any form, even when he receives a package from his deceased daughter that contains her diaries. But the diaries spark his search for salvation. He reads sections from them throughout the book; Heller begins each chapter with a different snippet, and through Sadie's writing we get to know her. Life hasn't been an easy ride for her, either: growing up knowing that everyone, including Sophie, thinks her father killed her mother; dealing with a miserable, drug-addled sister; struggling through an affair with an emotionally abusive married man.

Heller, a well-known London journalist, has a sharp eye for detail (one of Willy's nurses "had a tide mark around her neck and a greyish mole on her left cheek, sprouting two long, reedy hairs -- like a cartoon desert island"), but she doesn't fall into Tom Wolfe-like overdescription. She is adept at the broad-stroke assessment of New York crime, Mexican cockroaches, London malaise. She squeezes in some fine satire about the workings of Hollywood and keeps things breezing along with plenty of sex and boozing.

But except for the brief excerpts from Sadie's journal, the only voice we hear is Willy's, and his worldview soon grows tiresome. His vulgar, misanthropic rantings are more cutting than amusing. And given everything we know about him by the end of the story, it's difficult to believe that such a loathsome creature is capable of redemption. Sadie is the more compelling character, but Heller returns to her story all too intermittently. There are also a few irritating anachronisms. The story is set in 1981, yet there are references to Madonna, E.T. and Tom Cruise movies.

Still, with Everything You Know, Heller has proved herself a fine, original storyteller and a deft stylist. Let's hope that she populates her future work with people a little better -- or, at least, a little more interesting -- than Willy Muller.
— Salon

Sarah Rigby

There's an edge of comic melodrama to the novel, and it's clear that we're not always supposed to take Willy seriously. But he isn't simply a comic character and the book isn't intended only to be funny....Willy can't be seen as just an amusing monster or a comic stereotype: the plot and structure depend on our minding whether or not he can ultimately be happy.
—London Review of Books

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.--David A. Beron , Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Freeman

...Slowly, a story that starts out as a fairly well-realized portrait of a monster grows into something altogether deeper—a Bellow-esque inquiry into morality. Everything You Know is an intriguing debut...
—Time Out New York