All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg Sunday Book Circle - Part I
This novel is about a dysfunctional family, their individual issues, and their strange grief around the approaching death of the patriarch of the family. It follows multiple viewpoints, including Victor the father, Barbara the mother, Alex the daughter, Gary the son, and their families, including Alex’s ex-husband (though not his viewpoint) and daughter and Gary’s wife and daughter. The book also jumps into the minds of people that cross paths with them in the city of New Orleans and Los Angeles.
This is another book that probably I could have done without. In fact, it probably would have been better if it had never been written in the first place. All This Could Be Yours is written in response to the Me Too movement and the New Yorker article exposing Harvey Weinstein. Victor, the abusive father, is flat as a result. I complained about this when the novel first came out. Victor is just a mustache twirling villain, but someone countered to me that he was supposed be like Weinstein and just enjoyed hurting people.
But even having read quotes from Weinstein, I’d say the guy is less flat than Victor and has a lot of self-hatred, or at least subconsciously performative self-hatred. While a man who should have been dethroned and thrown in prison years ago, he’s still a human being and not a cartoon. But people want to believe that those who do evil things and do them for years are not human, that there’s no way anyone could have been fooled or sympathetic. But the truth is sadism, while horrific, is not an all encompassing personality. Maybe the sadist is also hilarious or a good cook or a math genius. Maybe they sometimes have moments of clarity and self-destruction. I’m not saying any of that forgives a sadist for any sadistic acts they commit, but it certainly makes them more interesting than Victor.
Victor is too much like Addie Bundren of As I Lay Dying, except As I Lay Dying is even less about how the people related to Addie than it is about how they related to each other. Nearly All This Could Be Yours is about how each person related to Victor, so we get a bunch of external pictures of Victor. It’s Attenberg’s out for not trying to get into the mind of a dark person and really explore it. I find this cowardly. I know it’s hard to get into the mind of a truly horrible human being. I’m having a hard time doing so for a novel about a misandrist who abuses men, but it being difficult is half the reason for doing it in the first place. First of all, it challenges you and secondly, it helps us better understand humanity to do so.
As writers, we should take risks, push what’s comfortable, and go after the more difficult goals. Victor being given a quick narrative snapshot from his point of view and then thought about and remembered for the rest of the novel is none of those things. It’s also boring and makes for a quick novel especially since Attenberg shies away from showing an abusive relationship in any detail (a lack of bravery again). He was a bad person. He made people’s lives difficult. End of story. No need to elaborate or make me read page after page of how he messed up his kids.
Become part of the community to read part II!
