Book review: Dominic Amerena’s ‘I Want Everything’ is the real deal

When news ripples through about the next big thing – the dazzling debut, the new kid on the block – one has to fight one’s inner Macbeth in order to give the tacker an even break.

The next big thing: Dominic Amerena. Picture: Anna Tagkalou

Writers are a jealous lot. Of course we are. There’s only so much space on the bookshelves, and those are precious waters in the funding well. So, when news ripples through about the next big thing – the dazzling debut, the new kid on the block – one has to fight one’s inner Macbeth in order to give the tacker an even break. That writers are allowed to review other writers should be brought to the attentions of ICAC.

Say a frozen-smiled “hello” to Dominic Amerena, a one-time Melbourne boy with a rock-star name whose luggage is bulbous with short story prizes and grants from arts bodies. His Instagram page shows a babe on his arm and a billing address in Athens, Greece – not far from the frolicking spirits of George Johnston and Charmian Clift – and it’s here, presumably, that he bashed out the debut novel that has the publishing mafia chattering like prank-store teeth. It’s enough to make an old writer sick, and if ever a bubble deserved to be pricked, this is it.

 

It brings me no joy, then, to report that the hype around I Want Everything is richly deserved. This isn’t just a hot debut novel, but a modern Australian classic, a low-watt urban thriller of silly dreams broken and high hopes dashed. It is also funny, but doesn’t try, terribly sad without using strings, and comes with a gut-punch ending that is as nourishing as it is unexpected.

I Want Everything is a book about writers and the grandmothers they’ll sell for fame. The narrator has no name we ever hear – symbolic, perhaps, of his opinion of himself. A wannabe writer with a stillborn novel in his laptop, he lives on the scrounge in some inner-city Melbourne dump with his girlfriend, Ruth, who is forever in the background, beavering away on an essay. Theirs is an unlived existence, their happiness in hock for literary ambitions that seem to be waiting for chance, or a short cut. “The only thing that wasn’t disposable,” Amerena writes, “was our income.”

What has all the hallmarks of another slack rummage through the gutters of dirty realism changes gears abruptly when our hero spies an old woman at a municipal swimming pool. It’s Brenda Shales, literary superstar of yesteryear, who wrote a novel or two that set the 70s on fire before a plagiarism scandal incinerated her own career and banished the author to obscurity forevermore. He tracks her down to a nearby nursing home, and, masquerading as her long-lost grandson, schemes to write a book about Brenda’s lost years, using her legend as a vault towards his own long-desired fame.

I Want Everything then switches between the narrator’s tawdry day-to-day affairs, troubled as they are by his own deception, and lengthy transcripts of Brenda’s recollections, and it’s here that the author’s gift both puzzles and shines. It may be considered pernicious these days for a male writer to presume himself into a woman’s persona, but Amerena’s drawing of this educated Aussie boomer – the coarse elegance of an old girl who no longer cares, the dismissive voice of royalty in exile – is so authentic that Brenda Shales fair strides from the page, and one could listen to her all day and all night.

It might be a waste of time to ponder her genesis, but Amerena is doubtless attracted to literature’s ‘lost’ women; Harper Lee, or, more on point, Renata Adler, whose 1976 novel, Speedboat, sent the New York writer into the stratosphere until her caustic and bruising reviews of contemporaries’ books saw the literati frogmarch her to a deep, dark place. It’s more likely Amerena has known this woman – perhaps, even, been in this very situation. If he built her from the ground up, out of sheer imaginative cloth, it’s a masterpiece.

What’s most interesting about I Want Everything is its hybrid nature; one can read it as a fun and suspenseful story, nothing more, or one can dive deep for meaning, for a fractal experience, and Amerena will be there to meet you. Brenda Shales’ breakthrough novel, Anchoress, stars a narrator locked in an empty room for a crime that is never revealed, an irony that seems lost on Amerena’s narrator, who is more intrigued by the lousy reviews the book gets from knuckle-dragging philistines on Amazon. There are other “Easter eggs” (as the gamers call them, these days), such as an early throwaway reference to Kylie Minogue’s Locomotion that comes to have an eerie resonance later in the book. Amerena has thought about every word in this novel, which can only bring depth and delight from multiple reads.

Like all superior writers, Amerena knows that arranging words handsomely is just Tetris if there’s no imagination behind it all. He doesn’t boast with prose, but corrals it in the service of his story. He’s sometimes cute – “Better to have a lie and not use it,” he writes, “than to need a lie and not have it” – but that’s more about the mind than the keyboard. I Want Everything is awash with Amerena’s unique thought process, delivered by one who can write in any voice he chooses. Occasionally, that voice belongs to Ruth – a bit player, really, but rather like the narrator’s conscience – who at one point paraphrases New Zealand writer Janet Frame (another contender) about the “two types” of writers that exist:

“There are the strange ones who can do nothing else, whose work consumes them day in and day out, writers wholly unequipped for the real world. The second kind are successful at everything. They could just as easily have been CFOs or ­gastroenterologists. There’s little room for the first kind anymore, the sickos and f...k-ups. Art’s become the province of the slick and brilliant.”

That’s Ruth, as Amerena’s sock puppet, in a book filled with opinions camouflaged behind the characters who utter them.

Of course, the discussion that follows I Want Everything will concern ethics, specifically whether Amerena’s narrator has any. Writers who have waded into the murky world of biography will understand the dilemma well enough – the smiling assassin ­driven by equal parts lust for fame and quest for truth. But the novel ends with a question that will keep book clubs effervescent for a while.

I wish I didn’t have to say it, but Dominic Amerena is the new kid on the block.

Give my regards to Leonard Cohen’s ghost, you rotter.

Jack Marx is author of Sorry: The Wretched Tale of Little Stevie Wright. I Want Everything

by Dominic Amerena, Summit Books, Fiction, 288pp, $25.99.