EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD
Lisa Levchuk
Farrar Straus Giroux
Fiction
ISBN: 9780374322380
208 pages
Whenever I’ve belonged to a book club, there’s always one person in the group who can’t really like a chosen book unless she can “relate to the main character.” Finding points of connection --- whether of shared experience or outlook --- with a novel’s protagonist is something that most sophisticated readers eventually grow beyond. For teens, however, that desire for common ground with a main character is often a given, something that young adult authors expect and consequently write for. That’s why Lisa Levchuk’s debut novel, EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD, is such a big risk --- with a substantial payoff.
For one thing, 17-year-old Edna, the protagonist of Levchuk’s novel, is a high school senior in 1980, a year in which many contemporary teens’ parents might have graduated from high school. Edna is growing up in a world before Facebook, instant messaging and cell phones --- one that today’s wired teens might view as ancient history.
More of a hurdle, however, is that Edna is not always a particularly likable character. Sure, she’s sympathetic enough --- her mother is suffering from cancer and she’s having a hard time confiding in anyone: her friends, her father, her shrink. That kind of response to trauma is easy enough for readers to understand, or at least imagine. What might be harder to swallow is Edna’s refusal to visit her mother in the hospital and, what’s worse, her blatant exploitation of her mother’s illness to elicit sympathy from her teachers and time to escape her school responsibilities.
When Edna plays the sympathy card, she’s not playing for time to go visit her mother, comfort her father, or even deal with her own grief. Instead, she’s bargaining for time with her ceramics teacher, Mr. Howland, whose sexy looks, groovy attitude and flirtatious style in the classroom make him a hit with all the girls. Only Edna, however, has the guts to approach her teacher with romantic intentions --- and then to embark on a secret affair with her married teacher.
Today’s sophisticated readers who, unlike Edna, have the benefit of years of parental warnings about lecherous older men stalking young teens on the Internet will probably immediately label her teacher a creep. Edna comes from more innocent times, however, and, as audiences will gradually learn and appreciate, she has her own reasons for becoming the complicated, prickly, fearful and, yes, not particularly likable character readers first meet. In surprisingly sophisticated first-person narration, Levchuk gradually reveals the elements of Edna’s story through her own questioning, sometimes self-loathing voice.
Not everyone will eventually warm to Edna. Her erratic state of mind and often childish behavior may strike some as tiresome immaturity rather than symptoms of larger fears and vulnerabilities. Others, though, will come to appreciate Edna’s complex story, to understand her doubts and her choices, to see her for who she is even if they can’t “relate” to her, and they’ll grow as people --- and as readers --- as a result.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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