Everything You Know
By Zoe Heller
Alfred A. Knopf/$22
Hack writer Willy Muller is supposed to be working on a screenplay adaptation of his memoir while recuperating from a heart attack. But he's too busy feeling sorry for himself and being an asshole to the few people who will still speak to him.
If he sounds repulsive, he is. But he's also darkly funny, and the truth is, people you might not want to know in real life often make great fictional characters. This main character of Zoe Heller's first novel is a case in point. He's deliciously cold and wicked, even when reflecting on his daughter Sadie's recent suicide and the death of his wife, whom he may or may not have killed during a fight. It's a mystery that will keep you reading even when you're so mad at Muller that you want to throw the book across the room.
Muller knows he's bad, and he doesn't much care. The only pride he's able to muster over his dead daughter is that "she did not leave any letters or notes or lipstick scrawls on mirrors to tell everyone why she'd done it." But when someone sends him a package containing her diaries, even that small respect is gone: "… as I trawled through the pathetic items in the envelope, I felt the familiar prickings of parental disappointment. She had, it seemed, succumbed to the sentimentalities of leave-taking after all. And Christ, isn't life hard enough without that sort of hokey melodrama?"
Her naive and plainspoken entries reveal the depth of his neglect and her consequent utter sense of worthlessness. These are interspersed with Muller's caustic takes on encounters with friends, lovers, business associates and strangers. Zoe Heller's Will Muller has all the acerbic edge and wit of John Updike's Rabbit and his same deeply flawed character. The question becomes, just how soulless is Willy Muller? And might redemption find even a man this jaded? It is well worth the read to find out.
—Susan Edwards
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2001.