It's beautiful, she said. I hate it.
Everything
By Kevin Canty, 2010
Back in 1999, Kevin Canty delivered one of the best (and unsung, it would seem) novels of teenage romance I've ever read. It wasn't a book for teenagers, but it was about two of them--a torrid love affair, screwed up with angst and extremity; a passionate, painfully felt trip doused with feeling. In retrospect, it's easy for Into The Great Wide Open to be thought of as an exercise in catharsis, like it's a story told mostly so that the nostalgic pleasures of young love can pour down, a swamp of memory to wallow in, but the first time--hopefully a young time--Canty's novel moves far too quickly to allow for easy dissection.
Everything is the fourth novel he's written, the first since 2005's Winslow In Love, a book that too neatly matched wits with Wide Open, focused as it was on a May/December romance between a depressive professor and a young girl not unlike the one who broke hearts back in Canty's 1999 debut. Winslow wasn't a bad book, but there was an emptiness to it whenever the two protagonists fell into one another, as if Canty was unwilling to deliver the sort of rawer edge that time around. That emptiness hasn't entirely disappeared in his latest work, but unlike Winslow, Canty seems to have decided to force that feeling--absence, confusion, resignation--into a bogeyman role whenever it arises. Unlike his previous novels, tied up as they are in the service of plots and fiction's love of forward momentum, Everything is messy work, an unhurried satellite orbiting a collection of people as they crash around in their lives, exchanging bruises for blood. Mixing short, unofficial chapters (some only a few sentences long) with lazy conversations and short, punchy descriptions of extreme decisions, the book looks as it reads: transcription, fragmented.
It's not for everyone. Alcoholism, cancer, fly fishing, affairs: this is an author who may never escape the tonal similarities his characters share with those in bad movies and synthetic book club choices. For some, he'll always be that author from the super-cool family, the guy who has a brother in Fugazi and another backing up Ted Leo. But for those of us who can abandon themselves, there's a value here, one that shouldn't go ignored. It's the warmth of sinking--deep to drown, in darkness buried--into those gracious worlds we cannot share, but would, when allowed, gratefully rest in for awhile.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
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