All This Could Be Yours

Fantastic novel about a dysfunctional family. The writing is so on point and the inner lives of these characters so well observed. This book has so much to say about the relationship between men and women.

Reminded me of the writings of Philip Roth.

I loved this novel of a dysfunctional American family - just my kind of read!

It's very character-driven and I always enjoy books where the minutiae of individual's lives are laid bare.

Many of the characters were not very likeable, but still you ended up rooting for them anyway.

This book takes place over a day in New Orleans: in the morning an abusive patriarch Victor has a heart attack and by midnight he is dead. The story follows his family as they grapple with the legacy and trauma caused by this brutal and misogynistic man. His wife Barbra is an elegant, beautiful and empty woman cloaked in diamonds and a Fitbit which she obsessively watches as she paces around the hospital waiting for her husband to die. She has lived a life of compromise for comfort, dependence and love - in a heartbreaking scene at her daughter’s birth, she negotiates with her husband telling him that ‘If you ever even think of hurting her, just hurt me instead. But you leave her alone’ (he largely abides by this, except for the 5-6 times when he doesn’t and strikes his daughter nonetheless). The daughter Alex is a lawyer, pressing her mother for the truth on Victor and his criminality, as her mother in turns urges her to forgive her father. She herself is recently divorced from a charming, successful but philandering man, trying to be civil in the aftermath to build a warm, supportive parental network for her daughter. The son Gary is in Los Angeles and is reluctant to be at Victor’s side as he dies, his whole life an attempt to define himself despite the cruelty of his father - early in his relationship with his wife he says, ‘I am the way I am because he was the way he was’. This is a tender and empathetic novel about surviving familial trauma and the catharsis that death liberates the protagonists to pursue.