Fiction Addict

Genre: Literary

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Released: February 2010

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor comprises fifteen stories of love, loss, and longing. While Taylor’s precocious talent is unquestionable, this collection ultimately feels as purposeless as the characters it portrays.

The stories in the collection address different aspects of young adult life—first love, feelings of being trapped in a place, trying to fit in, leaving the parents’ faith, “finding yourself,” etc. The stories are more descriptions, vignettes, sketches than fleshed-out stories. Readers looking for a driving plot are best served looking elsewhere (though this in itself is not a criticism). The hardest thing to handle in these stories for me is that the characters are static, starting and finishing in roughly the same place with no growth. (Perhaps this is how the author views adolescence, as a state of indefinite limbo until someone or something drags you out.)

For example, “In My Heart I Am Already Gone” starts with Kyle not liking living at home, and his relationship with his girlfriend, Sara, is “we date and we break up and date, and there have been others, for both of us . . . but as the years have moved our old friends away, married them off, or put them in their graves, our rediscoveries have lasted longer and longer.” They stay with each other mostly out of habit, even though they don’t seem to care for each other. The world moves around them, but they are stuck. The story’s conclusion finds Kyle in the exact same place, saying, “I will never escape this town.” While this stasis can be an effective storytelling technique occasionally (even the decision to stay the same or surrender is still a decision, an act of will), it loses its power with continual use.

Malaise and angst pervade the entire book. I found that this is best illustrated by an ambiguous statement Rose, the narrator in “Weekend Away,” makes: “Every day of your life is getting something you never asked for.” This sentence, obviously, can be taken multiple ways. One doesn’t ask to be born; every day is a gift, something to be celebrated. Rose, however—and most other characters in this collection—see this on the other side. “I can never have what I really want”; every day is an affliction, something to be endured. Since you can never have what you really want, why not snatch what happiness you can get? Thus, the characters behave more like wanton children than adults. They are self-centered, unfaithful, and unconcerned with the consequences of their actions. They exploit sexual relationships and drugs (both graphically described), only thinking of themselves. Their lives seem purposeless and empty, and it leaves the reader feeling that way, too.  The characters imagine that getting out of their current situation will change their lives; they don’t realize that the problem may not be their environment, but themselves and their own selfishness.

That Taylor’s writing is so promising makes the emptiness of the collection that much harder to bear. Style is an important factor for me, but especially in a literary collection like this one, where plot is not the driving force, there needs to be substance as well. As it is, the collection feels much like the list of the Abu Ghraib tortures that the narrator makes in “Jewels Flashing in the Light of Time”—a catalogue of vices designed for mere titillation. These vices, like the characters, are well described, but they lack a guiding principle, an insight that tells us why we should care. Taylor is very good at writing the sentences, not so with the paragraphs.

Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever does have its high points and will certainly connect with “unmoored” twenty-somethings like the characters in these stories, and Taylor is certainly a writer to watch with interest. But as for me, I think I’ll wait until he has something to say before I read anything else he writes.

Review copy provided by Harper Perennial