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A review by bookittome
Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories by Justin Taylor
3.0
Justin Taylor’s debut collection of stories seems to be guided by some universal list of all things hipster and disaffected. The Pixies are namechecked, we’re treated to the namedropping of Trotsky and Derrida. The fifteen stories are the lives of young Floridians and Manhattanities, endlessly aimless, and oblivious to the world beyond them.
It’s such a package of hipsterism that the collection itself nearly becomes meta, the epitome of Taylor’s description of Hot Topic packaging the conformist lifestyle, in “Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit,” where a woman muses on her Che Guevera-shirt wearing adolescence:
They commodified her emotions, sold her own rebellion back to her before she even knew it for what it was.”
But then a phrase like the above occurs and you can appreciate why Taylor receives so much acclaim. He can write. The characters of the stories aren’t exactly likable, but it’s Taylor’s ability to turn a phrase that has you rooting for them, feeling for them, pitying them, even as they engineer their self-destruction. His characters are flawed and everything in them is great: they know and celebrate these flaws, as in “The New Life,” Brad recounts his nerdy friend Kenny who “languished on the one rung of the social ladder I knew was above,” only to see his once wallflower friend a handsome and popular ninth grader. Left in the shadows and torn between a love for Kenny and Kenny’s twin sister, he turns to black magic assisted by a friend.
Sometimes we aren’t watching a character’s destruction, but their awakening of their own frailty, such in “Finding Myself.”
I keep finding myself in places I don’t expect me, such as outside churches, lurking, peering in their dooryards, or inside my own hollow skull, living a life to which the term hardscrabble might be astutely or ironically applied.”
Not all of the stories worked for me, but even in those that didn’t, there was a sentence that struck me with its unabashed nature, or beauty. I was intrigued especially by the number of stories taking place in Florida. As a Florida native, I could recognize the desperation and bleak one can feel in small towns; it’s palpable.
This isn’t really a book for teens. There’s some graphic imagery (snippets of the Abu Ghraib accounts) and sexual material, but for twenty-somethings, this collection will not only package their disenchantment with the world, but enlighten it too.
It’s such a package of hipsterism that the collection itself nearly becomes meta, the epitome of Taylor’s description of Hot Topic packaging the conformist lifestyle, in “Whistle Through Your Teeth and Spit,” where a woman muses on her Che Guevera-shirt wearing adolescence:
They commodified her emotions, sold her own rebellion back to her before she even knew it for what it was.”
But then a phrase like the above occurs and you can appreciate why Taylor receives so much acclaim. He can write. The characters of the stories aren’t exactly likable, but it’s Taylor’s ability to turn a phrase that has you rooting for them, feeling for them, pitying them, even as they engineer their self-destruction. His characters are flawed and everything in them is great: they know and celebrate these flaws, as in “The New Life,” Brad recounts his nerdy friend Kenny who “languished on the one rung of the social ladder I knew was above,” only to see his once wallflower friend a handsome and popular ninth grader. Left in the shadows and torn between a love for Kenny and Kenny’s twin sister, he turns to black magic assisted by a friend.
Sometimes we aren’t watching a character’s destruction, but their awakening of their own frailty, such in “Finding Myself.”
I keep finding myself in places I don’t expect me, such as outside churches, lurking, peering in their dooryards, or inside my own hollow skull, living a life to which the term hardscrabble might be astutely or ironically applied.”
Not all of the stories worked for me, but even in those that didn’t, there was a sentence that struck me with its unabashed nature, or beauty. I was intrigued especially by the number of stories taking place in Florida. As a Florida native, I could recognize the desperation and bleak one can feel in small towns; it’s palpable.
This isn’t really a book for teens. There’s some graphic imagery (snippets of the Abu Ghraib accounts) and sexual material, but for twenty-somethings, this collection will not only package their disenchantment with the world, but enlighten it too.