Everything You Need

Library Journal

Nathan Staples is a successful middle-aged novelist who feels that he has squandered his talent writing thrillers. He also regrets having abandoned his wife and daughter many years ago. When Staples discovers that his daughter is now an aspiring writer herself, he secretly arranges for her to win a fellowship to study with him on Foal Island, a writer's colony off the coast of Wales. Mary Lamb has no idea that Staples is her father, and Staples spends the next seven years trying to work up the nerve to tell her. Here, Scottish author Kennedy (So I Am Glad) reworks the story line of A Star Is Born, substituting literary fame for Hollywood celebrity. Mary's career quickly takes off, while Staples succumbs to writer's block and depression. Kennedy offers some devastating insider criticism of the current publishing scene, but her main objective is to examine the self-imposed obstacles that stand in the way of true intimacy. This hugely ambitious novel has an edgy, post-punk surface that only partly conceals the old-fashioned family values at its core. Recommended for most fiction collections. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The life of the writer is subjected to intensive and scathing analysis in this highly interesting (if more than a little overextended) third novel by the young Scots author of Original Bliss (1999), etc. Kennedy's two protagonists are Nathan Staples, an irascible writer who lives among a small colony of peers on remote Foal Island off the coast of Wales (and supports himself by cranking out Gothic "splatter" fiction)—and Mary Lamb, a hopeful young writer who comes to the island as its first scholarship student, remaining there for an entire seven years. What Mary doesn't know is that she's the daughter abandoned 15 years earlier, when Nathan left her and her mother Maura—a dereliction that the contrite Nathan now fictionalizes in an autobiographical novel-in-progress (New Found Land). This dual central situation does grow wearisome (although the novel-within-the-novel is quite beautifully written), but Kennedy has the good sense to keep distracting our attention from its redundancy with sharp portrayals of Nathan's companions (including a hilariously disturbed "performance poet" and a good-natured mutt named Eckless), the most fully realized of whom is his alcoholic editor and drinking buddy, the affably self-destructive Jack Grace. The focus, though, keeps returning to Nathan's patient stewardship of Mary's sensibility and career (each year she spends under his tutelage is dedicated to following one of Nathan's gnomic "rules"—such as "Pay attention to everything," and "Do it for love"). Brief emphases on Mary's upbringing (by her gay uncle and his love, in a small Welsh village) provide additional variation, but do not make her particularly believable as a budding writer(she's actually a fairly generic 19-year-old). Oddly, it doesn't matter: the tangle of secrecy, guilt, and irrational hope that underlies Nathan's Prospero-like guardianship of the daughter he yearns to acknowledge makes of their intricate double story a moving illustration of "the impossibility of creation without love." Not Kennedy's shapeliest or subtlest book, but probably her best yet.