Lame cover, right? I felt like a simpleton reading this thing. Still, I love Lydia Millet. If you haven't read Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), you should get up out of that chair and haul-ass to the nearest library right now.Anyhow, all of Lydia Millet's books are radically different from one another and, weirdly, actually read like they were written by different authors. This one, Everyone's Pretty (also published in 2005, but written long before), reads like a found manuscript by John Kennedy Toole.
Like Nicola Barker's Darkmans or a typical Robert Altman film, Everyone's Pretty follows a pretty huge and interconnected cast of characters as they each do a lot of running around and stumbling through zany misadventures. Each character is over-the-top, enormously exaggerated, and all are desperately trying to inch towards some sort of individual happy ideal. Dean Decetes, the novel's central character is a pornographer and sloppy alcoholic with messianic delusions who is constantly getting beaten up. His sister, Bucella, is trying to be as pious and moral as possible in order to endear herself not just to God, but also to her gay co-worker with whom she's deeply in love. We also have Alice, a depressed and promiscuous co-worder of Bucella's, and Ginny, a teenaged math prodigy who hates her parents and is often on the receiving end of Decetes' sexual harrassment.
Despite the fact that these characters are hugely exaggerated and their madcap adventures often border on slapstick, none of them can actually be laughed at. The novel, while often very funny, never devolves into pointless farce, even if we're constantly afraid that it's about to cross that line. Really, Lydia Millet has thrown half a dozen not-so-ridiculous characters into a society where wild, outlandish actions are mandatory just to stave off the alienation and loneliness. It's a very sad novel underneath it all, and it takes her wacky sense of humour to keep us turning the pages.
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