Everything You Know by Zoe Heller

I'll clue you in on my prospective idea here:
Since the library has recently been reborn for me, I've been inspired to look back to my more literary days with more intelligent, controlled posting. It has seemed like the majority of my posts over the last year since our move here have focused completely on what was happening in my day...admittedly, nothing really worth posting about, since I never want to put TOO much information about my profession on the internet, lest some little child put two and two together. This would be quite the feat, since I subbed in a math classroom recently, and...well, we'll just leave it at that. I love to tear through books, especially after spending my day reviewing the parts of speech with my little freaky darlings. So it's big kids literary time here...time to review the thoughts of the day through the books of the hour.

Everything You Know...as I read this book (see summary here), I felt the masculine attributes in myself being drawn towards the sparse prose, dully vivid descriptions, and minimized realizations. One of my favorite small moments was a momentary brain jolt from the main character, Willy, as he watches the woman next to him sleep: "I watched a tiny tear of sweat making slow progress down the side of Karen's neck. Slightly creepy, that--the way the body keeps on doing its work while you rest: rumbling and oozing, the city that never sleeps. It would be more satisfactory if it shut down when your mind did." Moments like this in a book are bandaging to a bad day...that feeling of "oh, someone else too?" I have the nasty habit of waking myself up from naps because of the wetness of drool on my cheek. Give me a little credit here -- I am not a complete sleeping slob. This is only when I have fallen asleep on the carpet or on the small couch because my eyes can't stay open past 4:45.

Of course, there are more intimate realizations at work in the book: "We are taught very early, and most of us spend our lives believing, that there is a sliding scale of duplicity in life...well, the truth is, duplicity doesn't lend itself to any such neat system of evaluation." Insightful.

All in all, a good read -- the author bandies between letters from a dead daughter and the thoughts of the live father. The epistelary book is an artform that is resurging in effort, but not in completion. Most of the books I've read have some air of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to them, but don't go whole hog. They have a strong narrative built around the newspaper articles, diary entries, and letters. Somehow it's just not the same as, "To Ms. Saville, England: August 5th, 17--. So strange an accident has happened to us that I cannot forbear recording it, although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come into your possession."