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Novel ponders the circumstantial nature of violent evil
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Is there really cold, darkness in the heart of a murderer or can a man who knifes a hole in a woman's heart be a sensitive, hurt soul with really, really bad impulse control? Is there an impenetrable wall between the minds of killers and non-killers or, if we look uncomfortably close, is the animal instinct to lash out present in all humans; just meted out to different degrees?
Rae Meadows second novel, No One Tells Everything opens up all these creepy deep thoughts as well as offering a savory the mix of suspense, angst, and familial torment in this story of two lost souls who recognize each other.
Grace is a 35-year-old copy editor in New York at a second-rate weekly magazine. She lives alone, was recently dumped by a married professor, and spends her evenings pouring white wine down her gullet at one of those comfortable, depressing neighborhood places called "Chances". When a New Jersey college student, Charles, is arrested for the gruesome murder of a pretty young woman he was acquainted with, something in his outcast face speaks to Grace's own isolation. Her father's stroke brings her home to suburban Cleveland where she takes the opportunity to both explore her continuing torment over her sister's fatal childhood accident as well as snoop around the nearby community where Charles grew up. Believing Charles to be misunderstood and non-culpable if not downright innocent, Grace retraces the lost boy's steps from ignored over privileged high schooler to exploited and desperate college student. Grace begins communicating with Charles directly. She slips deeper into drinking, torments her parents for the cool, distant way they raised her and examines her own role in the accident that claimed her sister, the favored child's, life.
Meadows has a keen eye for the squalor of the drinking life. Here's Grace coming to after a drunken pick-up at a strip mall Chinese restaurant. "The phone rings and rings until finally it stops. Grace rolls over slowly--her brain feels like it is floating loosely in her head. She is naked, except for her socks and her watch, and she is alone. It is three a.m. The bedside light exposes an empty bottle of Hennessey on the floor near her bra and inside-out jeans. Panic gives way to regret, and then to shame. She throws up, first in the bed, and then again in the bathroom sink. There's a condom floating in the toilet. The mirror shows someone haggard and green, worn out. She can't remember much after arriving in the room."
The weaknesses of No One Tells Everything lie in the convenience of one of the plot contrivances. Brian, Grace's boss, covers for her when she keeps blowing off work. We are to believe that this sweet younger man continues to excuse Grace's increasingly offensive behavior because he has developed feelings for her after an office party make-out...oh, and also because she edits copy super fast. It strains credibility when Brian's attraction to Grace grows after she gets so drunk she has to crawl up his stairs. Meadows does too good a job of painting Grace's unpleasant condition; Bryan's--little more than an acquaintance, after all--would in a more realistic rendering be repulsed.
But outside of this non-fatal flaw, No One Tells Everything is a deeply moving, deeply satisfying novel. And I really loved the character of Grace. She's real in a way I don't often read: she's broken like an ugly gash in an expensive coffee table; she's too far gone to be remade by hand-holding puppy love or a tenuous truce with her parents. After a climax in which both Grace and Charles are purged of their deepest guilt, "No One Tells Everything" finds an emotional release that at once brings a sense of closure to a troubling story but also leaves behind a sense that everything is really, really not all right.
NO ONE TELLS EVERYTHING
by Rae Meadows
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