Books |
The All of It: A Novel
By
Published: Feb 10, 2024
Category:
Fiction
Ann Patchett and a friend were browsing in a used bookstore when her friend spotted a musty copy of “The All of It.” Patchett, who had won the PEN/Faulkner Award for “Bel Canto” and was a year away from opening a bookstore in Nashville, had never heard of it or the author, Jeannette Haien. But her friend was holding the book “as if she’d found a diamond ring in a jumbled tray of costume jewelry and was giving the diamond to me.”
The novel was short — just 142 pages. She could read it in a couple of hours.
When Patchett started reading, she was struck by the length of the first three chapters: they were just a few pages.
In the first chapter, Father Declan wants to fish. Thomas Dunne, the head ghillie — that is, “the servant who attends the rods” — tells him he won’t catch anything. The river is high from the rains, and the salmon are lying on the bottom, and the insects will bite him until his arms bleed, and there are only two days left in the season and all the desirable locations have been reserved. Father Declan insists.
In the second chapter, Seamus O’Connor, the eighteen-year-old who has the bad luck to be Father Declan’s ghillie, suggests a lure. Father Declan has been fishing for 52 years; he wants no help. And yes, the insects are biting — Seamus should go sit in the hut.
In the third chapter, Father Declan has made 25 casts and caught nothing. He thinks of Seamus — he knows nothing, he has no instinct for fishing, no sense “how your human patience connects to the creature’s patience.”
We’re now on page eight.
Chapter four: Kevin Dennehy told Father Declan four days ago that he and Edna have been living a lie for fifty ears — they’re not married. Now he’s on his deathbed, and Father Declan is urging him to marry Edna at once. Kevin refuses: “It can’t be done, Father. There’s a reason.” Edna supports Kevin: “Father, there’s a part you don’t know.”
As he’s dying, Kevin wants to confess, but he’s worried that Father Declan will “rage” against Edna, “being human as you are.” Father Declan promises “not to go against” Edna. Kevin dies before he can make his confession. Edna begs Father Declan to say in the death notice that they were married. He agrees… if she’ll tell him the truth in the confessional.
She doesn’t confess. She does tell Father Declan “the all of it.” It’s quite a story, about suffering and astonishing determination and a willingness to work hard and the little victories that add up to a life, and the empathy Father Declan finds for this woman, and the way that what may look like sin may actually be innocence. With a gun to my head, I wouldn’t spoil it with a revelation of the secret Kevin and Edna held for half a century. But I’ll give you this, near the end of the novel:
“Thinking back over the all of it with you, Father, and telling of it — it’s a dear thing for me.”
“And for myself, Edna. It’s harmonious, isn’t it?”
Fade out? No. Father Declan fishes again. He catches a twenty-four-pound ten-ounce salmon, and….
Jeannette Haien was a concert pianist and music teacher. “The All of It” was her first novel. When it was published in 1986, she was 64. As Ann Padgett says in her introduction, “It is so seamless in its construction that I can only imagine it was a story she had been thinking about for a very long time.”
If you can find a few spare hours…
[To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
