Written in the third person, each chapter changes perspective, and then rotates from character to character, briefly offering a snippet of each person’s experience (and, at times, expanding beyond that character’s perspective to explain the thoughts of a passerby who might be able to offer insight into a stranger’s life for just a moment to further understand misogyny and pain in a new, albeit transient, context, with each instance touching on something particularly gendered, like woman who wants a man to see her, or a father who has failed his daughter and is now dying alone).Īlex, the aforementioned daughter who’s most invested in unraveling the mysteries that shroud her father, consistently says that she wants to know what happened in his past to make him so harsh.
Victor is dying in a hospital, so there isn’t much time for the Tuchman family to examine their collective trauma, but Attenberg creates a structure that lends itself an extensive plot contained in a short timeline. All This Could Be Yours dives into the pain that this horrible man’s deed inflicted on his children-including his daughter, Alex, who wants to figure out who her father is at his core-and his wife Barbra, who wants, more than anything else, to keep these secrets quiet. But as I delved deeper into the book, I became less focused on the Victor’s crimes and more interested in the impact of his crimes on the women in his orbit. I thought about the ever-present parade of terrible men in pop culture, including the writers, the directors, the producers, and the businessmen, and how, like Victor, they deserved suffering, but may never fully receive it. I craved two things at the beginning of Jami Attenberg’s new novel All This Could Be Yours: I wanted to know the truth about Victor, the novel’s patriarch, who every other character views as terrible.
Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours (Photo credit: Melissa Hom)
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