‘There’s plenty of darlings here that needed to be killed’ – Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy is best known for his short fiction – his second collection, Love Begins in Winter (2009) bagged the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award – though he’s also published three philosophy books and a considerable amount of essays, both here in the UK and in the USA. Everything Beautiful Began After is his first novel. Loosely, it’s about a love triangle – aspiring French artist Rebecca moves to Athens to paint, and there she meets American George, a linguist and the alcoholic son of a troubled marriage, and Welsh archaeologist, Henry, who’s never gotten over his role in the accidental death of his infant brother. Rebecca, on the verge of starting a reluctant relationship with George, falls hard for Henry instead. Somewhat improbably, the two men meet and bond, and the trio settle into a hot, idyllic Athenian summer together.  But – spoiler alert – when Rebecca (newly pregnant) is killed in an earthquake, Henry finds himself unable to cope. He sets out on a two-year odyssey, flying from airport to airport around the world, writing to George, and generally trying to find a way, or a reason, to carry on – until, of course, finally, he does. 

So, first, positives: the Athenian setting is gorgeous, and the airport-to-airport Odyssey is a really excellent conceit (albeit one only suitable for a very wealthy Odysseus). And it’s a quick read, despite its four hundred pages. But the award-winning level of writing I’d been expecting? Well, I’ve got to confess, I didn’t enjoy this book at all. It wasn’t the plot – love, death, mourning and travel are all fine literary fodder – even though four hundred pages did seem excessive for a brief fling and some uneventful flights, and there were a few too many incredible coincidences and ill-thought-out sub-plots. I just couldn’t get along with Van Booy’s style. The book’s laden with ponderous, pointless detail; banal sentiment dressed up as profundity; ridiculous, sub-par Dawson’s Creek dialogue that was so self-congratulatory it made me want to slap the characters. The sentence structure is simplistic to the point of monotony. The latter half of the book, told from Henry’s perspective, is done almost entirely in the second person, for no compelling reason that I could discern. You probably don’t believe I’m being fair – you reckon I’ve overdosed on my curmudgeonly tablets – and I know I’m dragging against the critical tide. I have it on good authority that his short fiction is excellent. But, listen:

‘Rebecca dwelled on how everything had changed for her grandfather after her grandmother drowned and left him with a single daughter to raise that was her mother.’

This is not only sledgehammer backstory exposition – that adds little to the story except to foreshadow Henry’s later loss – but it’s also just awkward. Where’s the rhythm in the sentence? I don’t think you always have to show rather than tell in fiction, but the telling could seem a little more naturally integrated than this. And it’s maudlin, like much of the back-story detail we’re given. Then, later, Henry and Rebecca are trawling artefacts in the Museum of the Agora. She finds a once-valuable vase.

‘Rebecca told Henry that it was her favourite piece. ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘it will always be a mystery why people toss out valuable things.’ ‘They do, don’t they?’ Henry said, pondering the idea. ‘Let’s go somewhere and think about it.’ ‘

Rebecca’s a font of such inanities, but you’d think Henry – an archaeology graduate, after all – wouldn’t be so easily impressed. They’re well-matched, but it makes for tiresome reading. Here they are again:

‘‘I feel like you know me,’ Henry said. Rebecca turned to face him. ‘If I think too much about what we’re doing, I might get scared.’’

Is this really literary fiction? It’s clumsy daytime movie dialogue, as far as I can tell, and it’s stiff. If I met somebody who spoke like that, I wouldn’t fall in love with them, I’d mock them. It’s not just the dialogue – declarative profundities litter the text: ‘It’s impossible to love someone after they’ve died. And that’s why it hurts so much.’ Or: ‘There is no real life, except what we imagine.’

Then there’s Henry’s career in archaeology, which is rooted in the childhood of finding a worthless rock that he thought might be a fossil; he brought it to a professor who was amazed, in true Disney schmaltzy style, at the child’s passion:

‘’Please sit down’, he said to Henry’s father, ‘Years from now, I want you to look me up, and when this young man is older, I’d like to help with his education – if he’s still interested in all this.’ [They thank him.] ‘I need men like your Henry. People with faith.’’

I know the education system in today’s Britain is crumbling, but Indiana Jones himself is left trailing in the Inspiring and Unbelievable Teacher category with this new entry. Then there’s the pointless detail. We get each character’s every move, each morsel they eat, each sight they see. The penultimate paragraph of one chapter reads, ‘She directed you to a pharmacy on the corner. It was cheerful and very clean. You also bought toothpaste.’ Needless to say, unlike Chekhov’s gun, the toothpaste never re-enters the frame. I think Van Booy’s mistaking detail for significant detail. In one of Henry’s missives to George, he says, ‘Something strange and upsetting happened yesterday’, and he describes an elderly man’s degradation on a plane – which would certainly be upsetting to witness, of course, but it does little to advance or illuminate Henry’s own story. I’ve already mentioned the sub-plots, like the man that Rebecca befriends and paints, who’s there only to run his later happiness in Henry’s face, or the journal Henry finds that leads him to question Rebecca’s past, a red-herring that’s only there to get Henry to Rebecca’s home-town so he can begin to move on, and is then discarded – both the journal and the device are unnecessary and unrealistic complications. A judicious (or severe) edit could probably have cut Everything Beautiful down into a pithy novella that would have had the emotional punch that the author no doubt intended, but at its current length, it felt sloppy and unwieldy; there’s plenty of darlings here that needed to be killed.

Any Cop?: Obviously, for me, no. I really struggled to get through this one. The world is well-realised – Greece, the airplanes, the archaeological digs – but the characters and storylines were unconvincing. The real emotion that’s practically built-in to scenarios like this – the love affair cut short, the desperate survivor’s guilt – was overridden by bad dialogue and didactic aphorisms. Good luck if you attempt it, but it’s not one I’d recommend. Sorry, Simon.

Valerie O’Riordan