Book Review : Jordan Harper - Everybody Knows (2023)
I’ve never visited Los Angeles, but I've never head anyone claim it was a great place to live. Not even a good one. But even if it looks like a byzantine shithole where dreams die a horrible death, LA still feels like an interesting place. A schizophrenic shapeshifter where the highest and the lowest of human experience simultaneously happen every day or so. That's pretty much what Jordan Harper's already acclaimed latest novel Everybody Knows is about. I don’t have any contrarian opinion on it, it's as great as advertised.
In Everybody Knows, a crisis PR coordinator named Mae and a middle-aged enforcer named Chris who find themselves working the same case: the inexplicable murder of Mae’s boss Dan Hennigan. She's investing his ties to an influencer he was seeing and he’s investigating the seemingly unconnected shooter. Mae and Chris eventually cross paths and their old romance reignites right away, leaving their both their livelihood and their lives vulnerable to people who try to control the narrative, just like they do.
Jordan Harper is a rare breed of genre writer: a stylist. He's probably even better and making a novel feel more vivid and transfixing and most literary authors working today. His plots are mostly conventional, but his characters and points of view are anything but. In Everybody Knows, Harper operates his dark arts through the most important character in the novel: Los Angeles. She's a keeper of secrets with her own wordless language that can make your worst moments disappear for a price.
Mae explains it best when she talks to Chris about the meaning of power. She says something akin to (and I’m paraphrasing): true power comes from generating wealth for other people. Then you're truly protected. The star of Everybody Knows is this ecosystem of excess and correction that self-regulates around the murder of Dan Hennigan. Everywhere they go, Mae and Chris are faced with an iteration of this mechanism built to protect the communal illusion LA (and, to a certain extent, Western culture) was built on.
There isn't much of the illusion itself to Everybody Knows, but that’s what feels so slick and intuitive about it. Jordan Harper takes for granted we all know what he's talking about. For example, the first chapter happens in Chateau Marmont. A lot of us know it's a legendary place of debauchery in Hollywood, but we don't know what exactly happens there. Partly lifting the veil on an apocalyptic portrait through Mae’s point of view is a way to break the spell and nurture the myth at the same time.
With that said, Everybody Knows is a commercial novel. It's an extremely sophisticated one, but it aims to entertain the reader. Not to foster a deep emotional connection with him. Mae and Chris are serviceable world-weary character that would seamlessly translate to a television screen, but they’re not exactly people you can relate to. Especially Chris who’s somewhat a stereotypical enforcer living a marginal existence. He serves a purpose, but I would’ve taken a novel 100% narrated by Mae.
She’s the one with the Hollywood juice.
Because of that, Everybody Knows unfolds like a commercial novel and it made it difficult for me to take deep interest in the second part? This is a creative choice that feeds into my pet peeves, so it might not be a problem for you. There’s about two hundred pages of mystery buil-up and 140 pages of mystery unfolding and when you read as much as I do, mysteries all end up feeling the same when they’re unfolding and Everybody Knows distances itself from the pack a little less with its ending.
Don’t get me wrong, Everybody Knows is the mother of all summer reads. It's smart, sophisticated and highly cinematic. I had my qualms with how much of a mass appeal and a plug-and-play “adaptability” it has, but I’m a miserable old man who can’t ever enjoy things that don’t especially appeal to my sensibility. So take my criticisms with a grain of salt. This is as good as genre literature gets. You’re gonna have fun with it and you’re gonna have even more fun with the inevitable Netflix series it's gonna spawn.
