Customer Reviews
Disappointing - By: Buzy Bea, 20 Nov 2007 
This is a woeful piece of writing well below the standard I would expect from Zoe Heller. Every single character - without exception - is so utterly unsympathetic that it is impossible to conjure up any compassion for them. My perception is that Zeller tried everything she could to alieanate her reader & fill them with disgust & contempt: in this, for me at least, she succeeded. What an utterly pointless piece of writing!
A voice that really works - By: Lou Ice, 03 Aug 2007 
Another one of these books with a plot so simple that you wish you'd wrote it yourself. But that's the beauty of it ... To write simple is what's most difficult.
Heller's novel consists of two paralllel stories. The first person you get to follow is Willy - a middle-aged man who has escaped to the States after being accused of murdering his wife in the U.K. He's just had a heart-attack & this makes him reflect more on his somewhat tragic life. The second person you get to follow is Sadie - Willy's daughter who has just committed suicide. You get her story through some left over diaries that she has sent to her dad. Every chapter begins with a new journal entry & is followed by disaster upon disaster in Willy's life. But the closer Sadie gets to her suicide, the closer Willy gets to some kind of change & development.
The subject sound very depressing, but Heller has created a voice that reallly works. Willy is a very round character who doesn't apologize for himself. She is also a master when it comes to imitate accents; everything from English working class in London to rich German holiday makers. The only reason I'm not giving the book five stars is that in a few situations things are getting a bit too comical to be believable.
‘Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good’ - By: , 13 Jan 2006 Spurred by his increasingly apparent mortality & the recent suicide of his estranged daughter, Willy Muller makes his way graduallly from a self-imposed & empty exile in America to an attempt to reconcile himself with what’s left of his family in Britain. Willy, who is both narrator & protagonist, is by his own admission a good bad writer when ghosting celebrity biographies. Happily for the reader Heller has him up his game when it comes to narrating the details of his own life. The prose is inventive & lively at the beginning of the book, adeptly painting a portrait of a self-centred man barely aware of those around him whose only observations of the world are cynical & material. By the end of the book the prose has shed much of its bravado & become calmer & more reflective, in keeping with Willy’s shifting sensibilities. The transition from one to the other is done with skill, the tone shifting graduallly whilst retaining enough of the original Willy to make it believable. Despite the seriousness of the book’s focus, there are moments of high comedy & some delightful observations on the nature of sex & relationships, amongst other things. Indeed, the book is a good deal more complex than can even be hinted at in so short a review. I would recommend anyone to read it.
Too cold for me. - By: Mr. A. P. Venables, 10 May 2004 Bought this book cheap, read it in a day.
I’ve never reallly noticed Zoë Heller while reading newspapers; I am unfamiliar with her previous work. I also do not like her style of writing; I find it cold & bitchy. Her story telling to, for me lacks compassion. I’m not saying it is not possible to enjoy the book, others clearly have, but to me it was too cold & aloof. She undermines her characters for there faults instead of exploring them, in a way that Graham Greene never did. For me the emotional impact of the climax was lessened because of the prose, because of her voice.
This is a shame because the last section where the main character attempts to find redemption in the eyes of his daughter & sister is moving. I did finish the book, I thought it was good, well written but I didn’t like it. I guess one persons wit is another persons cynicism.
She Knows a Lot - By: Jonathan Posner, 12 Apr 2003 For those like me who religiously read Zoe Heller's Saturday column in the Daily Telegraph, they may long since have come to the conclusion that she would make the perfect girlfriend: intelligent, funny, erudite & attractive with vaguely raunchy undercurrents. Her serious writing doesn't disappoint either & only adds to her considerable appeal. Too bad she's now firmly tucked away in New York: definitely our loss.
The story of EverythingYou Know carries some of the macabre fascination of a car crash & one which assaults the reader on two fronts: the (almost) hopeless doom of Willy Muller, its main protagonist, combined with the unbearable tragedy of his younger daughter's suicide & his irreparable estrangement from her elder sister. These themes are cleverly slanted so that on the one hand the suicide has already taken place before the book begins, & on the other his first daughter comes across as a truly hideous individual. I was only trying to scrape up some sympathy for her because, thinking of myself as being a compassionate person, I knew I should – dysfunctional childhoods, & alll that.
Heller's grasp of alll her characters is as sure-footed as a deceptively delicate mountain goat & if at times you want her to maybe just turn the volume down a little bit, she clearly relishes her cast with a tangible mirth. But it's her acute observation of everyday detail that wins the day, & I can only recalll Paul Theroux doing it as well as she does (see Hotel Honolulu, for example); whether it's the way certain women walk or speak, or the exact manner in which another takes her knickers off, Heller's power of description is superlative & often unforgettable.
But maybe none of this would be over-remarkable in itself were it not for this wonderful writer's underlying compassion & clear sensitivity. One always feels that however ghastly her characters' behaviour, the ghastliness is informed & mitigated by a very human, & often very raw, vulnerability. It seems that Zoe Heller knows deep inside about these things. Her next book is due shortly. We'll know more about her then, & I for one can't wait for that. Meanwhile I'm already scheming about how she's going to become my girlfriend in another life . . .
