For the most part, stories about writers feel a bit exhausting, suggesting a lack of imagination or curiosity towards the world beyond the craft. Of course, there are always exceptions, and Dominic Amerena’s debut, I Want Everything, is undoubtedly, strikingly, one of them.
Amerena’s protagonist (deliberately unnamed) is a frustrated young writer who buys time to write by taking part in paid medical trials. His girlfriend, Ruth, is fierce and talented, and although he hates to admit it, he envies her success and talent. When, on the way home from his latest trial, the narrator spots the legendary author and recluse Brenda Shales, who vanished 50 years earlier amid a storm of controversy surrounding her novels, he sees a chance for a scoop. It’s a small lie at first, a slip of the tongue that makes Shales believe he’s someone else. But soon the lie, and his hunger to tell the story of the real Brenda Shales, snowball, and the writer must weigh his ambition against his humanity.
The thing about this novel is Amerena’s absolute commitment to the lie. The detail he brings to the made-up elements of the novel, and the way he embeds the myth of Shales into the familiar reality of Melbourne’s literary scene, reveals a master storyteller, and a writer who delights in fakery.
Shales is compared to Helen Garner, Germaine Greer, Janet Frame – “difficult women” whose sharp-tongued feminist literature catapulted them to success – and she is very believably a contemporary of these luminaries, clever and sharp despite the indignities of living in a low-rent aged care facility. She is described as the “best Australian writer living or dead”, and Amerena has rendered her so completely, and with such attention to detail, that it’s hard to believe she isn’t. Her story is as thrilling to read as if she were real.
As Shales starts to tell her story – in a narrative voice that is so vivid it threatens to drown out all the others in the novel – the extent of the narrator’s ambition is exposed. There’s a scene, shortly after she opens up to him for the first time, in which he is walking home and realises that he has been skipping, a subconscious reaction to the discovery of such a juicy story. Only moments earlier, he had gently tucked Shales into bed at the nursing home, thinking that she reminded him of his mother.
This knife’s-edge balance between cruelty and empathy speaks volumes about the roles and responsibilities of writers, questions that are very much at the heart of this novel. “I felt grubby and cringe,” the narrator reflects, on arriving home. He knows that what he’s doing is awful, but he won’t stop – can’t.
The novel is told in two alternating parts, with chapters featuring the narrator framing those containing Shales’s confession. Hers is by far the more interesting part; the frame is necessary, clever and well-written, but Shales’s confession is like a drug. Both reader and narrator are pulled back into the lie for one more hit. Her voice comes to life with a Garner-esque authority, but stripped right back to the raw, painful flesh. The story she tells is one of betrayal and confinement, in a world that offered very few choices to women. The narrator says Shales’s story stands for “the violence of history, and women’s place within it”; Shales is more pragmatic, describing her situation as “not particularly harrowing compared to what other women went through”.
While Shales is very much the star of the novel, the narrator and Ruth make for a strong supporting cast. Ruth bears a striking resemblance to Shales, and the narrator is unable to see the truth of either woman beyond his fantasy. Ruth and Shales are more interesting characters – their experiences and traumas are real where his are contrived – and the narrator appears, at least on some level, to know this.
The narrator starts out as a relatively sympathetic character, but as the novel continues, and he commits more deeply to the lie, and to the glee of his pending success, he devolves into something uglier and more interesting. Like Juniper Song, the protagonist of Rebecca F Kuang’s satire Yellowface (an almost too-obvious comparison for the literary deception at the heart of this novel), he is compelling because of how fully his character exposes greed and ambition; how poorly he disguises it beneath the veneer of “a story that must be told”. This, the novel seems to suggest, is the lie that writers must tell themselves to survive.
I Want Everything is a playful, delicious tale of deception that speaks to the human cost of fulfilling naked ambition.
I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena is out through Simon & Schuster ($34.99)
