Everyone's Pretty: A Novel (Paperback)

by Lydia Millet (Author) "Fat men were often powerful, that was true..." (more)
Key Phrases: shitty fish, Bronco Bill, Dean Decetes, Jack the Sailor (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post
After a year of contentious elections, natural disasters and polarized opinions, it's no wonder the current mood seems to be focused on aftermath. Picking up the pieces and making sense of drastic change are both necessary and cathartic reactions, whether in life or in literature. Many readers may overcome the confusion by looking for fiction that affirms their beliefs and offers a healthy dose of escapism. Others choose to commune with the unending chaos around them.

Everyone's Pretty, Lydia Millet's fourth novel (following 2002's My Happy Life), succeeds remarkably (for the most part) at blending realism and escapism. Taken at surface level, its presentation of over-the-top characters placed in bizarre situations is supremely wacky, but underneath is an astute examination of how contemporary society fosters alienation and loneliness so acute that it takes outsized actions to allow any possibility of driving the demons away.

Over three days in Los Angeles, the kaleidoscopic narrative brings together five individuals whose lives already intersect but grow further tangled and, in some cases, irrevocably frayed. At this quintet's heart is Dean Decetes, a pornographer by choice and messianic vessel by delusion, who spends most of his time in varying degrees of drunken stupor. (But then, if you thought you were a messiah, wouldn't you?) His bizarre, tilting-at-windmills personality is on display from the first as he muses over his decision to stay gaunt: "Fat men were often powerful. . . . Their girth did not appear unseemly, flanked by the pillars and arches of state. Thin men, however, were the revolutionaries and the seers. . . . Emaciation and longevity went hand in hand."

Decetes's desire for immortality is thwarted and perverted -- sometimes literally -- at every turn. He is beaten to a pulp on more than one occasion, fired from his job as a stringer for a smut magazine and, after a stint in jail, inexplicably acquires a sex-obsessed midget for a mascot. None of these things endears him to his sister, Bucella. She desperately struggles to be pious and moral, gives serious consideration to joining a convent, but only succeeds at being clueless -- especially with regard to her not-so-secret crush on her boss at her desultory workplace, Statistical Diagnostics.

The other main players include Alice, whose promiscuity is underlaid by deep depression and tangible loneliness; Phillip, a quasi-masochistic Christian Scientist bonded in an unconventional marriage where self-denial rules his life, but not his wife's; and Ginny, a teenage math prodigy fueled by formulas and parental loathing, whose escape from her parents leads to the obligatory loss of innocence, although never approaching a clichéd level.

Everyone's Pretty could have declined into pointless farce, but Millet doesn't pre-judge or pepper the narrative with outside preconceptions. Morality is a shifting concept, but in the end it's left to the individual to determine how much or how little he or she possesses. That's why none of the characters can truly be laughed at; the situations they find themselves in veer from hilarious to cringe-inducing, but Millet never makes any of them the butt of the world's current joke.

The scene that catapults Ginny into flight has been staged many times before, but Millet expertly demonstrates how humiliating it must be for a teenage girl to have her mother show up in class, accusing her of all manners of depravity. She uses all the senses to depict Ginny's horror at seeing her mother "in her orange dressing gown with egg down the front and the rabbit slippers," even depicting the "rotten-egg gas" that assaults the girl's nose. Such descriptions add a vivid pungency, making the inherent embarrassment even worse and the scene successful.

By keeping authorial distance, Millet lets the characters tell their own stories and interact in increasingly twisted ways until finally the climax arrives -- or does it? The group of five go their separate ways, some truly moving on while others, like Decetes, find their own path to transcendence and glory. Still, one wonders whether each respective journey is really over. Millet ends the narrative but doesn't tie up every loose end; some remain suspended, while others are simply let go.

Paradoxically, Millet's exaggerated vision of the world offers a closer view of reality than would a more straightforward one. With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone's Pretty is both prism and truth.

Reviewed by Sarah Weinman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description
Written by the acclaimed author of My Happy Life and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, Everyone's Pretty is a savagely funny novel about the search for God, sex, and significance.

When he's not drinking himself into a stupor, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, or plotting his fame with a horny midget, Los Angeles pornographer Dean Decetes entertains messianic delusions and freeloads wantonly from his spinster sister. Distancing herself from her deadbeat sibling, Bucella obsesses over the quasi-religious love notes she writes to her boss and reassures a coterie of codependent coworkers, including a hygiene-phobic Christian Scientist and a depressive blonde bombshell named Alice. Next door, a teenage math genius has endured humiliation at the hands of her mother and is running away from home. She hightails it to a local dive and hooks up with Dean's editor from the porno magazine.

Told from five hilariously bizarre points of view, this novel serves up a fabulously florid cast of characters, many inspired by author Lydia Millet's two-year stint working at Larry Flynt Publications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (January 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932360778
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360776
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #435,927 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sex-Kitten.net Review: , June 26, 2005

By	Deanna Dahlsad (fargo, ND United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Rumored to be inspired by author Lydia Millet's two-year stint working as a copy editor at Hustler Magazine, `Everybody's Pretty' centers around the world of freelance porn reviewer Dean Decetes. While that may grab your attention, what keeps it is Dean's delusional status.

Told from the point of view of 5 characters (Dean, Bucella, Phillip, Ginny & Alice), all the characters weave in & out of each other's lives in a strange dance, searching for the meaning of life. Well, if not the meaning of life, searching for something more significant than what they have. Well, if you don't buy that metaphoric crap, then this is a search for God & sex.

God & sex are pitted against each other, mistaken for each other, and viewed as means to one another. Some obsess on God's ways, while some abstain from God's ways. Some abstain from sex, some are reborn in sex. Some abstain from God & sex. Some believe the are The Savior because of sex. Some believe in math as The Savior, but have diaphragms anyway.

The author has created the truly bizarre, but it's all plausible. It's epic & fantastic, yet each character is so rooted in some clinical state that you suddenly feel that it's all too real. It's sharp & biting, cruel when necessary, and while this certainly exposes the soft underbellies of the people, they retain if not dignity (and I must say, there may be indignant characters, there isn't much dignity!), some sense of respect or warmth, for Millet never goes in for the kill. Well, technically, since there is death, she does kill, but, oh what the hell -- this book is full of contradictions, humor & irony. Above all it's absolutely captivating.

I picked it up, read it almost in one day -- and I was pissed when I had to stop. 'Everone's Pretty' is fast & furious reading that nearly hypnotizes.

This is Lydia Millet's third book If it was inspired by her work at Larry Flynt Publications, I say give her a new job every 6 months, & let her write some more!

(Condensed Review)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I'd Give It 4.5 Stars If I Could!, September 7, 2006

By	Heatwaves (Santa Ana, CA USA) - See all my reviews

What a fantastic little book! Not only is it a very funny read, but the characters are so richly drawn that they'll stay with you for quite a while. A couple of weeks after reading the book, I still find myself contemplating who should play each character if it is ever made into a movie. Now I know that it's doubtful that this "under the radar" gem would ever make it to the silver screen, but I couldn't help imagining either Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Jack Black as the vulgar, yet magnetic personality of Dean Descetes. Give this book a try, I guarantee that you'll be quickly passing it along to your friends as a "must" read.