Everything: isn’t that what readers look for in a book? Many authors think so.
PRH – Doubleday Canada, 2015
One suggests that Everything Leads to You. Another insists that Everything Was Goodbye. (Nina LaCour and Gurjinder Basran)
One begs Tell Me Everything, while another is concerned with Everything I Never Told You. (Sarah Salway and Celeste Ng)
One announces that They Left Us Everything, which is perfect for the one who thinks that All We Want Is Everything. (Plum Johnson and Andrew E. Sullivan)
Two recent YA novels confront “everything” head on: Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies and Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything.
These are novels about everything: life and death, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, desire and disappointment.
When Everything Feels Like the Movies is saturated with Jude’s voice: direct and sassy, smart and provocative.
Jude draws a heart in the steam on the mirror after his shower and wears red lipstick so he is always ready for his close-up. Everyday he stars in a movie in his mind, because reality is harsh and unforgiving. (In some ways, Raziel Reid’s novel is quintessential CanLit.)
“I’m going to end up the next Matthew Shepard!”
“You wish you were that famous.”
When the novel dips into more philosophical territory, it creates a space for readers with a variety of reasons for reading. “And I loved lies because, when you’re a lie, you’re anything, you’re everything.”
One could envision a brightly coloured poster, the sort that might be stuck to a guidance counsellor’s office wall. “When you have nothing, you have dreams.”
Or, one could delve into a serious discussion of the role of celebrity and fantasy in the lives of everyday teenagers in this millennium.
It is a novel of extremes, which is partly rooted in Jude’s point-of-view and partly a nod to an adolescent audience. Jude’s observations about the world are dramatic, but they are born from the truth of his experiences.
It is this contradictory style, both in-your-face and chameleon-like, which invites a wide variety of readers into Jude’s story.
A solitary narrator’s perspective, the lens focussed on a single person and a single voice, can leave readers feeling claustrophobic or like intimate friends.
When Everything Feels Like the Movies is the director’s cut of Jude’s life and Everything Everything is all about Maddy.
Both Raziel Reid and Nicola Yoon capitalize on their narrators – and both beckon seductively to readers – but their approaches differ stylistically.
Maddy’s narrative is comprised partly from observations made in her own voice and partly from diary entries and other supplementary text and images, from online chats to screenshots. (Nicola Yoon’s husband contributed the drawings in the book and they reveal Maddy’s playful side.)
She, like Jude, is animated and clever, observant and funny. Her review of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies reads as follows: “Boys are savages.”
Maddy, too, is struggling with a number of issues surrounding her identity. She experiences isolation and loneliness in a very concrete way because she hasn’t left her house in seventeen years.
Ironically, she lives under her mother’s care for a medical condition which could put her life at risk, and this situation creates the same kind of alienation that Jude experiences, even though he is out in the very world which Maddy longs for.
In both novels, the question of wanting and the taut thread of desire dominate, in both concrete and metaphysical forms, whether it manifests as a raw yearning or a silent ache.
Maddy and Jude long for a kind of intimacy which is denied to them in their everyday lives. They are solitary figures, viewing the objects of their desire from a distance, forced to imagine what it would be like to have everything.
The epigraph to Nicola Yoon’s debut is drawn from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Anything and everything: regardless of age, many readers respond to a fundamental exploration of identity, a sudden and disturbing realization that the essential is undeniable.
Even if the specific details which reside in these characters’ hearts do not resonate with readers’ personal experiences, the underlying questions (love and longing and everything) invite readers to relate. And urgently too: both Raziel Reid and Nicola Yoon have paid attention to their novels’ pacing and structure: When Everything Feels Like the Movies and Everything Everything are hard to put aside (even after reading).
“A week later, something startles me awake. I sit up. My head is foggy with sleep but my heart is awake and racing. It knows something that my head doesn’t yet know.”
Maybe Life Is About Losing Everything (Lynn Crosbie).
Or maybe Everybody Has Everything (Katrina Onstad).
But When Everything Feels like the Movies, then Everything Everything matters: readers’ hearts and minds want to know.
Stories: they mean everything.
You’re so good at finding the parallels between books that for some of us seem and feel so completely different (or maybe it’s only me!). But, this is so true: “Maddy and Jude long for a kind of intimacy which is denied to them in their everyday lives. They are solitary figures, viewing the objects of their desire from a distance, forced to imagine what it would be like to have everything.” Jude’s life, though, felt much more painful to me than Maddy’s did.
I’m guessing that Maddy would have felt that her suffering was acute, and in the end she does have some bigger questions to wrestle with than she would have guessed, but I agree that Jude’s story is irrevocably painful and he has no respite from his trials. With a key relationship (that could have been sustaining) unravelling, just when he most needed it to grow rather than recede on top of everything else, and of course the overarching plot (which readers learn in the first pages of the novel, but I’ll keep quiet about it here) which unshakeably supports your feeling about their different experiences. You’re quite right.
I was forgetting about the things Maddy will have to sort out with her mother – the book ends before that happens.
I think it would’ve had to be shelved in the adult section if she’d written beyond that point: gonna get ugly! 🙂
Your review has suggested and/or opened a wide variety of topics which could be the basis of a longer discussion of these novels. I read Raziel Reid’s novel some time ago so don’t believe I can comment on it directly at this point. I find the concept of lying a very interesting one and also the roles that celebrity and fantasy play in the lives of “everyday teenagers in this millennium”. I think it might be possible that both of those concepts, i.e. celebrity and fantasy, may now play roles in the lives of more people than just teenagers. In fact, possibly the concept of reality itself and what it means to people now as compared to earlier generations might be a discussion that could stem from these novels.
Anyway, your review is most enjoyable and Jude and Maddy, as searchers for identity in a very different and challenging society would make an interesting study.
I was late in reading Raziel Reid’s novel, long after it was the topic of so much discussion, both for winning the GG and being one of the Canada Reads choices; so, no wonder you don’t remember the gritty details at this point. It was lucky, though, that I ended up reading them in close proximity, as it gave me a lot to think about.
As for the question of celebrity, I’ve just started reading Timothy Caulfield’s book, which wonders whether Gwyneth Paltrow is Wrong about Everythng, and he has some very interesting thoughts on the question of celebrity, which makes it not so much about generations as about the impact that recent and current technology and cultural trends have had on people’s relationships with celebrities (perceived relationships and different patterns of actual engagement), across age groups. It’s pretty interesting, and I’m sure you’re looking for another book to add to your stacks!
Having a partner who can provide illustrations is very lucky.
I’m curious whether they’ll collaborate on other projects; it does seem awfully fortunate!