October 28, 2024
British actor Everett debuts with an appealing collection of stories, many of them culled from his ideas for scripts, that address themes of loss, love, and the pitfalls of fame. The title entry, which takes the form of a rant, bemoans the fickleness of Hollywood (an “American no” is when a director gushes over an idea, then ghosts the creator). In “Hare Hare,” set in present-day London, the narrator runs into a failed producer who’s taken up with the Hare Krishnas. Everett’s wide range of settings include mid-19th-century India, where, in “The Last Rites,” an unhappily married Englishwoman is widowed, captured by revolutionaries, and presumed dead, only to secretly live as a Muslim wife. A new life is also in store for the protagonist of “Ten-Pound Pom,” a young Irishman who abandons his careless family for a fresh if turbulent start in 1952 Australia. The standout “Sebastian Melmouth, the Morning After and the Night Before” portrays Oscar Wilde’s final night in Paris before his death, an inspiration for Everett’s film The Happy Prince. With these astute character-driven tales, the author proves to be a storyteller of many talents. Everett’s fans have cause to celebrate. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.
January 1, 2025
An American no, in Everett's parlance, is that unique entertainment-industry rejection bathed in the insincere language of acceptance. A project pitch is greeted with open arms and closed minds and wallets. Enthusiasm dies when the office door closes. Actor, versatile writer, and documentarian Everett is no stranger to these occurrences and bases this collection's stories on the dismissals he has endured. The promise of love and remembrance is celebrated in such sweeping tales as "The Last Rites" and "Ten-Pound Pom." The indignities and vagaries of fame and the pursuit of fortune are skewered in the campy "Cuddles and Associates." Oscar Wilde gets his due in "Sebastian Melmoth," as does Marcel Proust in "The End of Time," which takes the form of a screenplay. Everett's writing is dynamic and glib, knowing and innocent, atmospheric and frothy. There is bleakness and buoyancy in the imagined worlds he conjures. If these stories were nixed by movie execs, this collection shows they are worthy of a second look. Coming soon to a theater or streaming service? A resounding yes, please!
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February 1, 2025
In a book of autobiographical short stories, Everett exhibits the same rakish charms as a writer that he shows as an actor but also reveals a deep streak of romanticism. The title refers to the way film pitches are rejected in Hollywood: after loud initial enthusiasm, silence. No stranger to the phenomena, Everett blithely announces, via the narrator of "Hare Hare," that he has turned his rejected ideas "into a book of short stories" and goes on to describe a meeting with director John Schlesinger with precision and fatalistic insouciance. While discussing a film the two were making together (presumablyThe Next Best Thing, 2000), Schlesinger dismisses Everett's suggestion for a funeral scene, a tragicomic story Everett now tells to establish his book's purposeful blurring of memory and invention along with its themes of exile and lost family. Even when Everett struts his signature jaded wit--particularly in a story about a band of Hollywood losers with questionable scruples whose act of creepy desperation inadvertently turns them into successful entrepreneurs shilling "deals in fertilization"--what resonates is loneliness offset by flickering moments of connection. The longer, less glibly polished stories show more sincere emotional commitment. In "The Last Rites," based on a fictionalized combination of his great-grandmother and Margaret Wheeler, a woman who mysteriously survived India's First War of Independence in 1857, Everett writes a poignant almost-ghost story about a British woman stuck in India in a bad marriage. The description of India is haunting, the ending strained. Similarly, Everett's story of a shipboard romance between a British man and Greek woman emigrating to Australia after World War II combines heart-wrenching characters with an earnest, even sentimental plot. There are stories about the lives and works of two gay literary icons, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. Throughout, though the plots can sometimes feel contrived, Everett renders scenes in vivid, often moving detail. Quirky, uneven, but enchanting.
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