The (Rare) Possibility for Redemption: Zoe Heller’s ‘Everything You Know’

Zoë Heller loves a nasty narrator. Consider the infamous Barbara of What was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal or Audrey of The Believers, whose remarks were expertly deployed verbal cleavers. In Everything You Know a paperback reprint of Heller’s first novel, we are given Willy Muller, a British writer of dubious credentials. His most lucrative work is ghostwriting biographies of middling celebrities. Oh, and there’s the money from To Have and To Hold,Willy’s memoir of what happened to his wife, Oona.

Oona died after somehow smacking her head into a refrigerator door handle during a marital disagreement. That Oona was drunk at the time was no help to Willy’s case. Once a television newsman of good repute, he becomes a vilified figure both publicly and personally. His daughters, Sophie and Sadie, turn on him. His sister-in-law, Margaret, finally has real reason to detest him. Only his sister, Monika, remains loyal. After spending time in prison, Willy flees England for Los Angeles, where he reassembles his wrecked life into a cramped, angry existence.

The books opens with Willy in the hospital. He’s had a heart attack, an event that leaves him unmoved: “Heart disease runs in my family, so I had been anticipating this attack for a good twenty years.”

Willy finds the hospital filthy, his caregivers fools. Wanting nothing more than a bath, he dismisses a social worker bearing a tape titled Meditation Chants and Prayers for the Sick informing her that illness-based trauma is not his worst enemy, she is.

Amazingly, Willy has a few buddies who find his temperament amusing. He even has a girlfriend, Penny, a make-up artist who good-naturedly tolerates his barbs, which far outweigh his kindnesses. Penny is Heller’s version of a California airhead, a make-up artist whose own maquillage is poorly applied, caking in the crevices of her eyelids. Her lashes are lumpen clumps of mascara, her nostrils “pinched and undersized” thanks to two botched nose jobs. Her lips, Willy tells us, resemble “varnished wood”. As if this weren’t enough, she’s had a bad face lift, which she freezes regularly with Botox injections.

A lapsed Mormon, Penny is given to the sort of Californian pronouncements non-Californians adore poking fun at. “You can’t run away from you,” she chides Willy. “You can’t count your blessings in the dark,” adding “You can’t take care of anyone else till you take care of yourself.”

It’s easy to laugh, but Penny is genuinely good-hearted, something Willy recognizes. What the reader wonders is why the woman bothers with him. More surprising is Karen, whom Willy has a casual relationship with behind Penny’s back. Karen is 25 and “does something completely useless for one of the studios. She has blondish-pink eyebrows, and she is diligently energetic in bed.”

Karen may be an idiot, but she’s also a friendly, nice-looking woman. What does she see in Willy Muller? As Muller leaves her sleeping in bed to bathe, he scrutinizes his reflection. While we’re never given his precise age, he’s clearly well into middle age, and his middle age bears no resemblance whatsoever to George Clooney’s. Willy wonders why women are still sexually interested in him. So do we; it’s one of the few flaws in an otherwise sure-footed book.

In Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, Meghan Daum defends her adopted home of Los Angeles thus: “I won’t lie: conspicuous intellectualism is not L.A.’s racket. When Midwestern kids get on that proverbial Greyhound bus… the brainy ones tend to go east and the good-looking, not-so-brainy-ones tend to go west… I’m generalizing, of course… Either you’re among the chosen or you’re not. Either you get why it’s good to live in L.A. or you don’t.”

Heller, who is English, has a rollicking time with the good-looking, not-so-brainy ones. She understands Los Angeles, but doesn’t get why it’s good to live in L.A. Her Los Angeles, stocked with brainless women, second-rate agents, and repulsive movie personnel, is sure to mislead—however amusingly—those readers who have never visited the place.

Willy’s Los Angeles acquaintances accept his version of events regarding Oona’s death: a drunken fall during an argument. Yet Willy’s troubles go beyond Oona’s death or his weak heart. His ghostwritten biography of television bigwig Reginald Boone is overdue. Atop this, he has received a package from daughter Sadie. Only Sadie is dead by suicide, leaving behind a small child, Pearl, in care of the reviled Margaret.

Included in Sadie’s package is a journal, kept from age nine until her death, sometime in her early twenties. Initially Willy vows to destroy the document, but hospital boredom and a curiosity he’d rather not admit to soon have him reading.

Sadie’s diary offers the reader another perspective on the Muller family’s implosion. he journal begins just after Oona’s death. In it, we meet a sweet, confused little girl whose incomprehension of events is alternately amusing and saddening: (sic) “He (Willy) 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 lawyers all the time.”

Sadie and her elder sister, Sophie, are sent to live with Willy’s sister, Monika, who is soon overwhelmed by the girls, particularly Sophie, a pretty, sexually precocious girl who has inherited her father’s disposition. The girls end up with Margaret, who also finds Sophie intolerable.

The story moves between Sadie and Willy. Willy is discharged and demands that Penny procure him a pastrami sandwich, hardly heart-friendly fare. Inwardly he’s deeply disturbed by Sadie’s diary, which evokes memories threatening to crack Willy’s scabrous veneer. His musings round out the story: how he climbed up England’s cruel social ladder from the lower class to his position as a television journalist, his early, happy years with Oona, their bewilderment at the arrival of Sophie, always a difficult child.

At the urging of his agent, Art Mann, Willy rents an expensive villa in Mexico, where he is to recuperate and finish the Boone manuscript. He’s also been asked to modify his screenplay of To Have and to Hold, which smokin’ hot Hollywood director Hans Stempl has picked up. Grudgingly he packs himself, Penny, Sadie’s diary, and his computer off to Puerto Vallarta, “Pee Vee” to his friends, and settles in.

Sadie, meanwhile, is quickly growing into a nervous teenager. After much sleeping around, her sister has taken up with the drug-addled Nial and given birth to the hyperactive Jack. The three live in a council estate. Sophie is far from a doting mother, and though she refuses to speak with Willy, she regularly hits him up for money. Disgusted and dismayed by Sophie’s life, Willy is still her father, and dutifully sends checks.

Lacking the sexual confidence of her sibling, Sadie’s adolescence is a bumpy one. She’s disturbed by Sophie’s actions, which include drug use during her pregnancy. Her own visits to various therapists soon become a source of weary distaste. “’That must have been very difficult for you,’ he said when I was done. They always say stuff like that. ‘This must hurt.’ …Yeah, yeah, boo hoo.”

Willy’s appeal to women may be a mystery, but Heller is deftly manages to elicit sympathy for him. As he describes Oona depression and drinking, his difficulties with the role of fatherhood, and, most movingly, the good memories of early family life, a time of little money but enough happiness, we come to understand why, like Audrey in The Believers, he’s become so embittered. While his continued bad behavior makes complete forgiveness is impossible, we still feel a glimmer of fellow feeling. Willy is mightily flawed, but he’s not incapable of loving other people: he is a human being.

Sadie leaves Margaret’s home, joining Sophie, Nial, and baby Jack in a squat, which she admits “isn’t very nice.” Depressed and adrift, passive, she fall for a married man who treats her abominably. Yet she becomes increasingly obsessed with him.

In Mexico, Willy manages to find trouble even when he should be working. His romantic life is a mess. Hans Stumpel is just down the road in another, fancier resort, and would very much like changes to Willy’s screenplay that add lots of meaningless action while completely altering the story. Sadie’s diary casts Willy back in time, reliving his childhood with his highly strung, German-born mother, whose marriage to Willy’s father Hermann, a Jew, meant the family was forced to move about Europe before settling in England. Hermann dies abruptly, leaving his wife with two small, half-Jewish children who are left to raise themselves.

Willy’s aged mother dies, and he flies to England, ostensibly to help Monika clean out their mother’s home. He also plans to try and visit Sophie.

Even with Penny at his side, the visit is a disaster. Monika is kindly and helpful, as always, but Sophie has voluntarily sunken into squalor. Nial is a serious addict. Jack is already in therapy for hyperactivity. After a painfully awkward visit with Willy, Sophie once demands money, and receives it gracelessly. Any hoped-for rapprochement is lost. Cleaning out his mother’s apartment isn’t much better. Willy hightails it back to the States, where he learns his finances are severely dwindling.

Sadie has become pregnant by her married lover, Michael, who mercilessly insists on abortion while cruelly noting her “fat fingers” and swollen feet. When she decides to keep the child, he abandons her.

Despite his financial woes, Willy returns to the overpriced Mexican villa. Mayhem has ensued in his absence, and after a series of blunders, Willy comes to terms with himself, the truth of his life, and the need to take responsibility for himself. Of Heller’s three novels, this first one offers a chance at redemption her other two works do not. There’s some happiness to be found at the close of The Believers, but it doesn’t come close to Willy’s voluntary efforts to make amends. hether this is a statement about Heller’s progress as a writer or her changing views on the possibly of atonement remains to be seen.