New West Book Review

Missoula Writer’s New Novel Takes on “Everything”

By Jenny Shank, 10-11-10

Everything
by Kevin Canty
Nan A. Talese, 282 pages, $25.95

Kevin Canty’s accomplished novel Everything tackles life on its elemental level, forming an understated drama out of the ordinary events of a handful of lives: birth, death, sex, youth, aging, marriage, divorce, illness and real estate.  So the title isn’t lying.  Written in spare, concentrated prose and suffused with wry humor and frank observations, Everything follows a group of Montanans at a point when they’re battered by the regular everything that has happened in their lives and are searching for what to do next.

At the center of the mess, there’s RL, a divorced, fifty-something single parent who owns a store where tourists buy bait and tackle and can hire out a river guide, such as his employee Edgar, a new father with an art degree and a restless streak.  There’s June, a hospice worker who was married to RL’s childhood best friend until he died of a heart attack at 39, eleven years before Everything begins.  Now she’s thinking of selling her beloved home, whose value has increased dramatically.  There’s Betsy, RL’s college girlfriend who lives in a remote area with her family; RL agrees to let her stay at his place near Missoula while she receives chemotherapy treatments. 

And there’s RL’s 19-year-old daughter Layla, who’s just starting to make the series of mistakes that will earn her the psychic misery, interpersonal baggage, and sun-baked skin the others are saddled with.  She’s ready for it, “hungry for experience,” as RL remembers being at her age.  At one point she looks down from her apartment window in Seattle where she attends college and sees a drunken couple in love.  Canty writes, “I want, she thought, looking down at the drunk couple.  I want what you have and I want more.  I want all of it.  I want more of it than there is.”

She’ll get a big dose of it before Everything is through.  “I know this is trouble,” Layla thinks deep in the book, in the midst of a predicament lust gets her into.  And trouble is life, Canty’s Everything seems to be saying.

Canty’s characters are prone to making extra trouble than is strictly necessary.  Layla starts an adulterous affair with Edgar at about the same time RL starts one with Betsy.  June, meanwhile, has declared, “I am officially letting it go.  All of it.  I’m nobody’s widow anymore.” But then it takes her some time to act in accordance with this declaration; she has mourned her dead husband for eleven years, living in the house they fixed up with the dog they bought as a puppy, which is now ill.  “I am just sitting here waiting for the dog to die,” she thinks, and forces herself to take action. 

She calls a cowboy-hat wearing realtor named Howard to appraise her property, who declares it worth at least $2.2 million, and then she tries to fire up a relationship with him even though he’s not quite her type.  She’s ready to move on, but she’s stuck in the mire of her past.  Layla, who has been like a daughter to June since her own mother took off, has June pegged.  Layla observes in June’s bedroom: “A surprising crowd of perfumes and powders on the dresser, a well-lit mirror above.  June didn’t look like that kind of woman—green grass and fresh air was her look, short practical hair—but Layla understood that it was never that simple.”

Everything is appealingly full of little stories, jokes, and vignettes—the one about the Montana grandpa who can’t understand why his San Diego grandsons don’t relish shooting gophers, the one about the hippie girls RL used to enjoy “ before they all turned thirty and became strict and sour,” the one about the good-looking, wholesome Mormon girls in bikinis at the swim-up bar of a Mexican resort, ordering “Virgin Marys, Arnold Palmers, Cinderellas and coco coladas.” All of these little digressions gracefully reinforce Everything‘s themes, as does this paragraph in which RL remembers staying with his mother in the hospital while she was dying:

“Her last ten days, when he slept in the waiting room, or in a chair in her room while she struggled for breath, RL sometimes took the elevator up to Labor and Delivery just to watch happiness, just to believe in it.  Strolling the corridor, feeling like a spy—he didn’t belong there, he had no business—RL strained to see the new mother through the half-open door, the little blanket-wrapped bundle, the older brother or sister with balloons or flowers, the sad exhausted husbands who were happy but something else at the same time, something nobody cared to name…Even in the happy place, the other crept in.”

Everything is suffused with an admiration for the remarkable Montana landscape without being mushy about it.  Living in Montana has shaped these characters’ bodies and influenced who they are.  Montana is why Layla knows how to fish as well as she does (she “could turn a fat trout in a bathtub") and why RL’s hands are “battered and wrinkled and spotted,” and why the skin on Betsy’s face is “windblown and rough” from “a life in the open.”

Canty has been exploring the themes of lust, adultery, parenthood, and the complications of real estate for most of his career.  He’s delved these preoccupations masterfully in Everthing, plumbing new depths, creating an artful rumination on the way that “time annihilates.”

Kevin Canty will appear at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula on October 30 as a part of the “Shiver Runs Through It” Gala Reading at the Wilma Theatre (7:30 p.m., free), and at several of the panel discussions and readings throughout the weekend.

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