FICTION: JOHN SELFreviews Everything Beautiful Began AfterBy Simon Van Booy Beautiful Books, 416pp. £15.99
IT’S NOT unusual for an accomplished short story writer to struggle with the requirements of the novel. John Cheever, who wrote some of the finest stories of the 20th century, never transferred his talent wholly successfully to the longer form. Simon Van Booy, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009, has shown no such difficulty. His first novel is sustained, unified and makes a coherent whole; which is not to say that it is without difficulty.
Everything Beautiful Began Afteropens with an enigmatic prologue from a character whose existence is only hinted at on the last page of the book. ("Everything was already here and I am the last to be born.") This clever structure – the book begins far in its own future – is representative of Van Booy's careful, controlled style.
The central story gives us three characters drifting in Athens: Rebecca, Henry and George. They each meet by accident, and together become a triangle of friendship and love. Each has family trauma in the past, and they come to rely on one another to provide an unreliable sort of stability. Rebecca’s mother abandoned her, and she dreams of becoming an artist, “to be loved for moments beyond her own life”. Henry’s childhood tragedy, “the winter that defined him”, has left him “impersonating the man he should have been”, as he uncovers ancient Greece as an archaeologist. George is an alcoholic, or to put it another way, “looked the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed”.
The book is atmospheric and anchored in its place, though not in time. There are almost no indicators of when the story occurs; the only technology which features prominently is a satellite fax machine. Van Booy’s aim seems to be to write a book that is timeless but not rootless.
There are plenty of dramatic and surprising developments, and the psychology between characters is fascinating. How, for example, does someone who already defines himself by loss, manage when loss returns? Is the pain of remembrance better than forgetting a happy past? And how does our experience of a place change as we move from living in the past, to living for the future? There is a section of the story told entirely through facsimile letters, which seem absolutely real for the strange poetry of their aimless anecdotes.
This immersion into one character’s mind which the letters gives us, contrasts with the forced weightiness of some of the narrative. Van Booy has an appetite for summing characters up in a line, which can feel like the author’s thumb on the scales. He has a gift for imagery – as when Rebecca holds “bobby pins in her mouth, then applied each one like a sentence she would never say” – but sometimes overdoes it, with lines which don’t stand up to inspection. (“The side mirrors fold out by themselves like ears”. I’ve never seen ears do that.) This seems part of a wider flaw in Van Booy’s writing: a weakness for significance, which leads to many dramatic one-sentence paragraphs, or a character saying “What a beautiful thing to say,” when another character says something beautiful. At the level of characterisation, it shows itself as a belief that human behaviour can not only be categorised, but attributed to one or two personal historic factors.
Sometimes Van Booy’s risks pay off. Halfway through the book, he switches to a second person narrative from Henry’s point of view (“You leave the museum . . . You pass a butcher and then a hairdresser”). Second person narrative is rarely done – and rarely done well – but here it works to force the reader into closer intimacy and empathy with Henry. Still, Van Booy sometimes forgets that what you leave out is as important as what you put in, and he’s at his best when hinting at the horrors of internal struggles, rather than insisting on them.
In retrospect, it might be obvious from the title of the book that minimalism and understatement are not Van Booy's way. In the last sections – hurried after the stately pace of the early chapters, but neatly conclusive – George describes Sicily as "unsophisticated but sincere". Everything Beautiful Began Afteris highly sophisticated and absolutely sincere, but not always convincing.
John Self writes about books on the blog Asylum
