An eminently readable page-turner of the highest degree, I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena is a deliberate skewer in the face of postmodern autofiction. I loved loved loved loved loved loved loved this novel.
The premise of this Australian debut is simple: an unnamed narrator recognises an elderly, reclusive author in the public swimming pool and intends to unfurl her life story as a biographer. Crucial to the unfurling of this premise is the fact that the reclusive author, Brenda Shales, wrote two novels at a young age and then disappeared following a high-profile plagiarism case. In the process of connecting with Brenda Shales, the narrator is mistaken for her grandson. He doesn’t correct the mistake.
Amerena’s text deals in such grey areas: the ethics of plagiarism, the truth-telling inherent in the act of lying, the lying inherent in the act of truth-telling, and the ways in which fiction muddles all this up so that plagiarism, truth and lies are all a part of the same amorphous pool. I ate I Want Everything up like a dog eating my own vomit, recognising my own self-recrimination in my reading of the novel, guilty of the same mask-switching Amerena’s unnamed character is.
Tonally and formally, I Want Everything sits readily in conversation with core autofiction texts of the 21st century. It would also be easy to compare the novel to the autofictional works common in contemporary literature; Amerena doesn’t quite let us off so easily. This novel regularly analyses its own fictive qualities.
“What happened was only legitimised when it became literature,”
the reclusive elderly woman says to our unnamed narrator toward the very end of the novel. Earlier, the protagonist has been completely unable to dissolve truth in the materials of literary text:
“I felt the bolus of truth trapped in my throat, which I could neither swallow nor spit up.”
It would be easy to infer that components of this novel speak to Amerena’s own life, particularly given the close first-person narration, particularly given all the hallmarks of autobiographical fiction included, not in the least the fact that said first-person protagonist is a writer co-constructing the narrative that we are in fact reading. But this is a novel of masks on top of masks, and such assumptions are continually upended. A clued-in reader will get the sense that Amerena is always at least two steps ahead of you, even once the novel ends, as if actual satisfaction lies just out of reach.
I mean this in the most positive of senses: you want the book to keep going after its actual closure, to give you more answers, more clarity, but it isn’t there. Time to dig deep, dig back through the novel beyond its surface pleasures, which are many and frequent. Amerena’s humour regularly jolts with the ring of 21st-century shitposting, sometimes literally. There is an extraordinary amount of toilet-going in this book. Most of it happens ‘off-screen,’ as it were, but Amerena’s go-to way out of a scene involves his characters saying something like
“nature calls.”
Charitably, this might speak to the presence of a psychoanalytic streak throughout the novel, the abjection of the body emerging through the literal frequency of the need to expunge shit, like the truths/lies Brenda Shales does/doesn’t share over the course of the book, or the pretend grandson roleplay the novel’s protagonist gets caught in. Uncharitably, Amerena might just think about shitting a lot more than the rest of us. In other such 21st-century news, the protagonist speaks about being fucked by his girlfriend
“like a catamite until I squeal my safe word du jour: Trump, Trump, Truuump,”
or overhearing said girlfriend teaching a class on Zoom in which she encourages a student
“to consider what the fisting is a metaphor for.”
Such topics superficially register as attention-seeking. The novel often drops strange non-sequiturs that evoke the off-kilter, slightly noxious humour of Ari Aster’s recent Beau is Afraid. Nonetheless, the charm of the humour eventually works on the reader, particularly given that it contributes toward a fictive reality as densely confused and tonally clashing as the actual 21st-century mediascape we all find ourselves living inside. There’s no way to describe such tonal flippancy in an appealing way, but I loved it—I found myself trusting Amerena’s protagonist more for his facile humour. Amerena ultimately gets away with utilising the apparatus of fiction in such a bald-faced manner. It is literally, as one of the blurbs on the back of the book states, like a heist, in which the crime happens right in front of our eyes.
And of course, to so many of our peers who don’t have access to the apparatus of fiction to make sense of the world at all, the heist won’t even look like a heist. I Want Everything is ultimately about everyone that lives beyond and outside of fiction . . . the ways they get caught up in storytelling, poetics and language. Speaking as a writer, people in our lives do end up wearing costumes in the material we build our careers from.
With all of the above in mind, Amerena’s novel functions like a dumping ground for all the least ethical components of work as a contemporary novelist: the entrapment of the artist within capitalism, the incessant waste the body produces, or the waste produced by a life lived, produced by the internet, by our entrapment within political snares, histories both national and personal. It’s a novel of the most secular concerns.
When I reviewed Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans for bad apple, I noted the way that novel is secretly about the conversion of secular life into religious experience. A similar thread runs through Sally Rooney’s most recent two books, Intermezzo and Beautiful World, Where Are You. There is no such conversion of the secular to the religious in Amerena’s novel: the protagonist requires
“no priest…to get…closure,”
referring to himself as
“the self-absolving subject.”
Between Taylor, Amerena, and Sally Rooney, the sublimation of religious impulse into contemporary Western life is a clear thread across current literature, and in particular, our inability to resolve the tensions of a social world with no unifying belief. By the time the protagonist gets so caught up in lying that there no longer seems any way out, he begins to imagine that other people might
“make my confession for me.”
The use of the word confession here is particularly telling for its religious connotations, given that the novel itself is effectively a confessional act, though its legitimacy, its truth, remains crucially untouchable, illegible, and beyond reach. The reclusive Shales herself conceives of her story as an act of confession, with the unnamed narrator as her confessor. So the boundaries of the text once again get blurry. Who is confessing to whom, and why? Why speak? Why stay silent?
In posing such questions, this is a novel of the zeitgeist. With a new Lena Dunham show Too Much, out this week, I thought more than once of her previous brilliant HBO show, Girls. Girls is better now than when it first aired and carries many shared qualities with Amerena’s novel, including an autodidactic, narcissistic central character. Both wield serious thinking with a satirical approach to their own artistic context. Both get a little bit blurry around the autobiographical edges. Both are comfortable with speaking loudly into silences, and both are comfortable remaining silent on ethical grey areas within their respective texts.
I Want Everything is a breeze to read, despite the demanding nature of the questions it raises. I’d recommend the novel to everyone, but especially to anyone interested in reading fiction that rubs itself in the face of moral puritanism.
“I was drawn to writing to process the shame I’ve felt as long as I can remember: shame for being born, which has changed into shame about who I am.”
I’m there on opening day to purchase whatever Amerena writes next, even if it’ll involve once again knuckling down into my own muck.
