Kevin Canty's EVERYTHING

Kevin Canty's new novel is a big hit. Major media reviews of EVERYTHING have been positive and enthusiastic. According to Kevin O'Kelly at Boston.com, EVERYTHING "is about people at turning points in their lives who think they don’t have any good choices, but who end up going forward anyway for the simple reason that they must." O'Kelly also praises the mechanics of Canty's writing: "Canty’s prose is spare but evocative: Ten of his words do more to convey the yearnings and pangs of his characters than other writers could achieve in 20."

If that doesn't make you want to read the book, here are links to a few more convicers.

The New York Times review.

EVERYTHING reviewed on NPR.

Review in the New Yorker.

Review from the Chicago Tribune.

Here's an excerpt from EVERYTHING:

The fifth of July, they went down to the river, RL and June, sat on the rocks with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and talked about Taylor. The fifth of July was Taylor's birthday and they did this every year. He would have been fifty. RL had been his boyhood friend and June was married to him. He'd been dead eleven years.

This side channel used to be one of Taylor's favorite fishing spots, but five or six years before, a beer distributor from Sacramento had built a twenty-room log home right on the bank and then drove a Cat D6 into the river and piled up a wing dam, to keep his house from falling into the drink. This pushed all the current out of the side channel and into the main river. A few last big fish lurked down deep in the channel but mainly it was suckers. Still, it was a pretty spot to sit on a long evening, the shade of the tall cottonwoods slowly deepening into green water. A pretty spot if you turned away from the log palazzo. They sat on the rocks and watched the water trickle by, the cool splash of river water over gravel.

I wish . . . said June.

You wish for what? RL asked her.

I wish I had a cigarette, she said, and laughed. June smoked exactly one day a year, and this was the day. RL got one out, gave it to her, lit it. He was smoking a cigar himself. He had bought the pack specially for her. The two of them stared at the smoke as it curled through the still air. RL could just barely hear the trucks passing on the interstate, a mile away. The sound always made him lonely, the thought of all that highway, all that American night out there.

These anniversaries, said June. They keep sneaking up on me. He's been gone, now, longer than I ever knew him. Read more.

You can find more information about Kevin Canty and his books at his Web site:
http://www.kevincanty.net/Site/Welcome.html