GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT

A promising young filmmaker visits the summer home of a famous director and her daughter.

Shortly after taking a workshop with her idol, Ellen, in London, Ruby is delighted by an invitation to come out to the director’s place in the English countryside. Having had her first short film screened at Sundance, Ruby is now working on a script for a feature, and the opportunity to get Ellen’s help as she puts the final touches on it seems a dream come true. But the visit turns out to be a different sort of dream, dominated not by creative mentorship but by intense and confusing relationships with Ellen and her 20-year-old daughter, Lara, and by a brutal July heat wave that makes even eating a meal a challenging project. Though Ellen’s home apparently has no air conditioning, it does have a swimming pool, and as Ellen is slow to offer any plan for working together and Lara is procrastinating her college applications, the two younger women spend much of their time in bikinis. “She looked at me, her hair lit up gold by the sun, the freckles on her nose. She said, what would you do if I kissed you? and before I’d even really processed that, yes, that’s what she’d said, she’d done it.” As things heat up between Lara and Ruby, Ellen announces she has to go to London. Suddenly responsible for Ellen’s chickens, her greenhouse, her house, her grounds, and her trouble-child daughter, and not yet having received any help with her script, Ruby finds she is far from up to the task, as well as quite angry. In her sophomore novel, Crimp returns to the theme of women in the arts, and her hypnotic first-person narration runs together with the dialogue, using no quotation marks. But Ruby’s shaky self-esteem and passivity about getting what she needs from this situation eventually becomes frustrating for the reader, and the slightly creepy, claustrophobic mood is like a gathering storm that never breaks. The question of whether Ellen actually intended to help Ruby or had something more exploitative in mind is never clearly answered.

Strong on atmosphere but light on plot, as if the story itself were paralyzed by the heat wave it so effectively depicts.