At the core of Everything Beautiful Began After are three very flawed characters whose emotional crippling as children leads them to unusual relationships as adults. Love and grief take extreme forms that enlighten and intrigue the reader.
The narrative voices, which vary with each major section of the book, are for me the author’s most distinctive and impressive accomplishment, but also sometimes part of what makes this a challenging read.
For example, Van Booy opens with a Prologue told in a very convincing child’s voice. But because children care little for guiding anyone through their thoughts and they tend to jump through non sequiturs, my first read of the prologue left me very lost. Only at the end of the book do we figure out (or at least only then did I figure out) who this intriguing child is, and we never get to know her beyond this brief prologue, although her existence confirms a pleasant working out of things at the end of the book—a kind of ah ha! of understanding that fills things out for the reader in retrospect. Here’s an excerpt from the prologue with this child’s voice:
“Once there was a tree upon which she found something growing. Something shuffling inside a small, silken belly webbed to the rough bark. A white sack spun from fairy thread. She visited her magic child with devotion. She spoke quietly and hummed songs from school.
Words at their finest moments dissolve to sentiment.
She couldn’t be sure, but her child in its white womb was growing, and sometimes turned its body when she warmed it with breath.”
I like the child’s view through which we see a cocoon, which to the adult eye is far less of a mystery, and the dedication the child expends on it, true to many children’s ways. I’m less sure of the purpose of the line about words dissolving. This sounds authorial to me, not childlike. I did find many places throughout the book where I clicked a bookmark (I was reading on my Kindle) because I liked a pithy saying, a philosophical observation. This is one of those sort. So I have mixed feelings about it—these quotable bits are often enjoyed but usually interrupted my train of reading. If you stop to bookmark, that’s a good thing—but maybe not so much if it means you got stopped. One such quote I bookmarked, “Love is like life but longer.”
The narrative voice of Book Two is another of Van Booy’s impressive literary feats as it shifts to a second person point of view. If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class and been set this assignment—to write in the second person point of view—you will know that it is nearly impossible to do at all, much less effectively. In Van Booy’s hands it definitely expresses the dire emotional state of his character. It startles us in a vivid, dramatic way. It gives an immediacy to the narrative. But it also, for me at least, constantly drew attention to the author and his writing skills. Here’s a passage to give a sense of this highly unusual narrative voice:
“When you awake, you know that you have to leave but don’t know where to go.
Eighteen hours have passed, and you’re tired of being asleep. You’ve almost run out of money and you have no one to ask for help.
You sit up in bed, you drink all the water from the minibar and then eat the almonds and the pistachios, throwing the shells into an empty glass. You can smell vomit in the bathroom.
Then you shower.”
I enjoyed reading this book because it got me thinking about writing techniques, about how to extend the limits of voice, and about love, grief and the emotional fragility of human beings.
I was reading an electronic advanced reader copy that had not gone through final editing and contained formatting errors, so the quoted passages may not be in their final form of the published book.