Dominic Amerena’s debut I Need Every part gleefully satirises literary ambitions in its story of an opportunistic author crossing moral traces to jot down the biography of a well-known writer.
Our (unnamed) protagonist/narrator aspires to greatness and sees a bestseller within the providing when he probabilities upon an encounter with Brenda Shales. A cult feminist writer, Brenda as soon as burned brilliant within the Nineteen Seventies, however subsequently flamed out into seclusion, turning into a ‘nice thriller of Australian letters’.
Monitoring her to a Melbourne aged care facility, the would-be biographer grants himself entry to what he believes to be a literary scoop by posing as Shales’ grandson.
Each appalled and thrilled by his outrageous deception, the protagonist (and his conscience) is positioned underneath rising stress because the inevitable penalties arrive.
With its twisty, fast-paced narrative and deftly playful language, Amerena finds freshness with the trope of the artist struggling to stability ego and artwork, as our ‘hero’ makes an attempt to applicable his topic’s literary glamour and fame.
A pleasant black-comic thriller, I Need Every part is at its core about writing – its mundanity, its ego, its determined goals of success in addition to literary appropriation and male entitlement.
A self-awareness persists all through, a droll however not unsympathetic tackle literary life, significantly within the protagonist’s wry reflections on the opportunism of the struggling author (‘I used to be formally towards prizes till I began getting shortlisted’). Later, describing the topic of his biography apparently overdosing in entrance of him, he confesses tellingly, ‘When Brenda collapsed, my first thought was for the e-book’.
In the meantime, the presence of his girlfriend Ruth, a much more profitable and productive author, ‘pounding the keys as if her laptop computer had finished her mortal hurt’, is an ironic counterpoint to his personal feckless and doubtful observe.
This self-awareness is acute, proper down the sinews of the writing. In context, for instance, the shortage of speech marks feels not only a deliberate nod to ‘hip’ stylistic developments however the would-be biographer’s tenuous claims to his reliability as a narrator: blurring the traces between what was ‘actually’ spoken and what’s ‘mere’ writing.
In the meantime, the novel’s shifts between the protagonist’s and Brenda’s factors of view, the latter self-consciously grand-eloquent and declarative, serves I Need Every part’s playful tackle authorship and authenticity.
And but I Need Every part feels simplest in Amerena’s exploration of the atypical actual humanity motivating its characters’ varied determined claims to glory. The protagonist’s relationship with Ruth, for instance – and his evolving self-awareness of his identification inside it – are written by Amerena with considerate, unromantic perceptiveness.
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Equally, the harsher realities of trauma and psychological sickness are used to powerfully subvert the trope of the ‘capricious genius’. These embody references to shock remedy undertaken on the infamous Chelmsford private hospital in Sydney’s Pennant Hills within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies – the chilly (well-documented) actuality of which breaks right into a e-book that toys with the blurring of reality and fiction to startling impact.
By pursuing this emotional sensitivity, Amerena turns I Need Every part into one thing extra than simply an Australian literary satire about biography: a bleakly humorous but humane portrayal of the usually complicated need to transcend the painful or mundane limitations of 1’s personal identification.
I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena
Writer: Simon & Schuster/Summit Books
ISBN: 9781761631733
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288pp
Launch Date: 30 April 2025
RRP: $34.99
