Everything Under

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Johnson’s harrowing, singular first novel (following the story collection Fen) retells the myth of Oedipus Rex, putting a modern spin on a familiar tale. Gretel, a lexicographer in her early 30s, has finally been reunited with her mother, Sarah, after a long search. Sarah, now suffering from dementia, is far from the woman who left Gretel to the foster care system 16 years ago. Gretel’s childhood prior to that had been carefree but insular, spent primarily with Sarah—“a wildish girl and her wilder mother”—on a houseboat in the canals of Oxford, where they spoke in a private language and were stalked by the Bonak, a monster that lived in the river by their home and represented, as Gretel defined it, “what we are afraid of.” For a time, they’d been joined on the houseboat by a transgender boy named Marcus who had left the only home he’d ever known to escape a prophecy, crafting a new identity in the process. As secrets are uncovered (such as the truth of the prophecy that compelled Marcus to flee his home) and the consequences of past decisions reverberate into the present (such as the choice Sarah makes regarding her first pregnancy, before Gretel), Gretel realizes how close the Bonak they feared has been all along. This story about motherhood and self-determination is a stunning fever dream of a novel.

Starred review from October 15, 2018
A retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the insular community of the boat people who live along the canals of Oxford.Gretel was raised in the sole company of her mother, Sarah, on an engineless houseboat moored in a quiet part of the River Thames. Their relationship is intensely iconoclastic and isolated: They haul their own water, fish for much of their food, speak a language peppered with made-up words, school each other with entries from Sarah's encyclopedia. One winter, dogs, cats, and even children begin to go missing from the communities that live on the river. Sarah and 13-year-old Gretel believe it is the work of an uncanny creature they call the Bonak, and, with the help of a wandering boy named Marcus, they determine to trap and kill it. Now Gretel is an adult working as a lexicographer, and Sarah--who abandoned her into foster care 16 years earlier--has come back into her life in an even wilder and more unpredictable form. Sarah's phone call making contact sends Gretel on a quest into her own past: First to find Sarah, then to find Marcus, and finally to confront the Bonak, a creature made flesh by her and her mother's own fears. The book is structured in interwoven sections which alternate among Gretel's first-person perspective and the close-third-person narration of Sarah and Marcus, whose timelines take place in the past. As the truth about Marcus' identity becomes clearer, the haze that surrounds Sarah--a reimagining of Jocasta--deepens. However, where the original tale focuses on the torment of Oedipus himself, here the mother's rage, her despair, and her progressive disassociation from the known world are the centerpieces of the story. Sarah's past leaves lurid scars across her daughter's psyche as the book delves into what it means to live in a world that binds us so cruelly to our fate. Johnson's (Fen, 2017) debut novel explores the determinism of its characters' choices even as it asserts the fluidity of their genders and their relationships with each other, in prose that harmonizes with the haunting wasteland of its setting--a place where what is discarded takes on new identity if not new life.A tense, startling book of true beauty and insight. Proof that the oldest of stories contain within them the seeds of our future selves.

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November 1, 2018

DEBUT The quiet life of Gretel, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, is disrupted to its core when she receives a cryptic voicemail from the mother who abandoned her 16 years earlier. This startling event leads her to renew a search she had abandoned and takes her back to the time in her life when she lived with her mother on a riverboat. It also connects her to the family of Marcus, a young man who stayed with Gretel and her mother for a time and whose story may provide the necessary clue to the past and to her mother's present whereabouts. The story unfolds in several strands over different time periods, from Gretel's childhood with an eccentric mother who educated her from a set of encyclopedias and created a fanciful shared vocabulary, through the story of Marcus and his troubled early life, to the present, as Gretel eventually locates her mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's. VERDICT A haunting tale of children lost and parents found, this debut novel is a special treat for word lovers. [This book was originally scheduled for January 2019, but its publication was moved to October 2018 after it was short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize; see Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.--Ed.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2018
Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize, this dreamy, unsettling, and vividly poetic first novel by the British author of the short story collection Fen (2017) takes off from the story of Oedipus, not following it slavishly but using the myth to deepen a sense of dread. The story unfolds in England over the past 30 years. In the present, thirtysomething narrator Gretel looks after her awful, wonderful, terrifying mother, Sarah, who is increasingly lost to dementia. The two lived with only each other as company in a boat on the River Isis near Oxford until Gretel was 13, and then in a little apartment above a stable in the country, until Sarah abandoned 16-year-old Gretel to the foster system. The novel moves slowly but inevitably toward unraveling the mystery of just what happened immediately before mother and daughter left their home on the river. Equally disturbing strands of the novel follow Gretel's present-day struggles with her mother, her recent search for her mother, her recovered memories of the past, and the mysterious journey of a girl named Margot. With its lyrical descriptions of a frightening landscape as well as the inner worlds of its confused characters, Everything Under demands?and rewards?close reading and rereading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)