Everything You Know

This 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.

A well written but ultimately not terribly absorbing story told by a 50 something misanthrope now self-exiled in America. He spent time in prison for murdering his wife though he was later acquitted, he's estranged from one daughter while the other has committed suicide, and he has at least 2 girlfriends to fuel his sex life. He's unpleasant, all the characters are in their different ways unpleasant. Why should I want to spend a rainy weekend in their company?

I read this book thinking it was a new one from Zoe Heller, but Everything You Know is in fact her first book, written before Notes on a Scandal. It's not as well-crafted an effort—the structure not quite strong enough to sustain it even over just 200 pages—and I'm not sure that her main character (Willy Muller, a philandering fiftysomething writer best known for the book he wrote in the aftermath of being acquitted of his wife's murder, who lives in self-imposed exile from the UK and has nonexistent relationships with his two daughters) is ever sympathetic enough to engage the audience fully in his character arc. However, Heller shows a gift for character voices and for dialogue, and her prose is descriptive and original without show more being florid. show less

I 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.

One 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.

The snarky brilliant descriptions of people are great, although the characters are mostly either despicable or pathetic.

Willy 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.