Review: Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts

Josie Shapiro’s debut novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, was the inaugural winner of the Allen & Unwin Fiction prize. It is a triumph. The novel features Mickey Bloom, the youngest in a family with an absent father and loving mother. The title encapsulates what it is to be alive, especially when the protagonist discovers long-distance running.

The structure of the book is genius. A single race, an Auckland-based marathon, unfolds across the course of the book. I was hooked into the rhythm and unexpected tension as the surrounding narrative builds a poignant portrait of Mickey. The narrative impact is heightened by finely crafted sentences, while the pace and tension of Mickey’s life choices are as gripping as the individual race.

Mickey is an awkward misfit at school. Her dyslexia creates endless learning difficulties and she has no desire to master reading. School regimes are abhorrent to her and she has a propensity to be bullied, yet everything changes when Mickey joins an athletic club. She discovers something she excels at and she dreams big. Her adolescent longings and sense of ‘outsiderness’ shift. Some people get it (her mother) while some people don’t (her father, the school).

The novel explores a personal life, with love, death and illness making entries, but it also documents what it is to be an athlete aiming for glory. Mickey dreams of competing at the Olympics, especially after breaking a New Zealand record at the National Championships. So many heart wrenching questions piled up as I read. What drives some people to push their bodies beyond limits? What allows others to push us beyond our limits in order to achieve success in sports? Bodies become malnourished, body boundaries are transgressed, wellbeing is compromised. Do we do embark on difficult things for the joy of doing them? For self esteem? For fame and fortune?

In the media release, Shapiro links the fiction of the novel to her own experience as a young competitive swimmer: “I situated Mickey into a very similar place: a feverish obsession with her sport; a relationship with her body that was pushed to uncertainty and danger by the conditions around her; a life where men can make or break you.”

I recently heard a sports commentator complimenting the size and leanness of our elite swimmers and, having just read Shapiro’s novel, I wondered what sacrifice and pain were required to achieve this status. The questions resonate deeply because Shapiro has created a prismatic character about whom I care. It matters that she crumples. It matters that she finds joy and agony as her feet pound the road. It matters that she dreams big. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim imagines the perfect epitaph for his gravestone: ‘Everything is Beautiful, Nothing Hurts.’ In contrast, the title of Shapiro’s novel underlines that Mickey’s path to adulthood is beautiful and painful.

Shapiro’s novel played havoc on my heart but it also soothed and restored. Mickey’s mother, for example, is constant and wise. She underlines that while it is a joy to watch her daughter run, she is proud of her in multiple other ways. I took away some key ideas: that it is important to educate our children (and ourselves) to be safe, to nourish our bodies, to accept the advice of mentors, teachers, coaches and adults who have our best interests and safety at heart. Above all, I applaud the idea that self-belief matters and, equally, that the belief of others in you matters.

Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts is a rollercoaster, heart-in-the-mouth read that deposits you in the pain, ache and joy of both running and living. Mickey Bloom is a memorable character that will get under your skin, with her doubts and her struggles, her recognitions and her learning leaps. This book will linger with me for a long time.

Reviewed by Paula Green