All about Heather

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All about Heather (English original title: Heather the Totality ) is the literary debut of the American screenwriter and director Matthew Weiner , who was best known for the television series Mad Men . Advertised as a novel by the publisher , the narrow book is sometimes classified as a novella . The German translation by Bernhard Robben was published like the original 2017 edition. The focus is on four characters: a wealthy New York couple with their overprotected daughter and a psychopathic murderer.

content

Mark Breakstone and his wife Karen meet through friends. He is a well-paid financial analyst, but is regularly overlooked for promotions; it finds little fulfillment in the PR industry. The marriage is not a love marriage from the start. Since birth, daughter Heather has filled the void between the spouses. She is not only charming and intelligent, but shows a very special empathy for her fellow human beings at an early age . At Heather's puberty, the underlying tensions in the family break open. Karen is afraid of losing the deep bond with her daughter that has become her life. Mark has long felt neglected by his wife and reacts to his daughter's friends with jealousy.

Robert "Bobby" Klasky, the neglected son of a single drug addict, grew up much less sheltered than Heather. The most intense experience of his youth is the attempted rape of a neighbor's daughter. In prison, the skinhead only learns one thing : that he should have killed the girl in order not to leave any traces. He sets his mother's house on fire and fantasizes about more murders. He meets Heather during renovation work on the Breakstones penthouse in the Upper East Side . Since then, his fantasies revolve around the girl from a completely different sphere of life. Heather notices the construction worker's attention and is drawn to him with a mixture of compassion and kinship.

The intense, brutal look with which Bobby assesses the teenage girl does not remain hidden from her father. His paranoid fear for Heather, which culminates in dreams of her murdered corpse, is not taken seriously by anyone, especially not by Karen, who accuses him of incestuous intentions. So he decides to act alone. He lures Bobby, who no longer dreams of murder, but of a bourgeois life with Heather, into his apartment and throws him out of the window of the skyscraper. Karen helps her husband cover up the crime and suddenly feels sexually attracted to him again. Heather innocently believes in an accident at work and temporarily mourns the dead man. One month later the family moves out of the apartment.

History of origin

Matthew Weiner (2011)

Matthew Weiner, screenwriter at The Sopranos and inventor of the TV series Mad Men , is considered to be one of the creative minds who reinvented the series landscape on television and brought it into the focus of the feature pages with their way of narrating. After the end of the hit series Mad Men in 2015, however, he had no further TV projects planned for the time being. Instead, he started reading a lot, particularly Haruki Murakami , Donna Tartt , Delmore Schwartz , John Steinbeck, and Hermann Hesse . He then made his first attempts at writing in the Yaddo artists' colony in New York . According to Weiner, he always saw himself as a novelist: "For me it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream and a life-changing event to write this book ..."

The starting point for the novel was an observation on a construction site: when Weiner witnessed a construction worker staring at a young schoolgirl with threatening intensity, he wondered what would happen if her father had noticed the look. To the trio of this event, a vulnerable schoolgirl, a lustful construction worker and a worried father, Weiner also had a neurotic mother and thus had the cast for his story.

reception

Weiner's debut novel was well received by many fellow writers in the United States. The criticism, however, was divided. The New York Times criticized vague characters. The novel is "to be read quickly and easily," he said, but it does not leave much substance behind. The German-language feature articles, on the other hand, were mostly friendly.

Sandra Kegel sees everything about Heather as “an alternative to Weiner's writing, which was previously based on epic breadth and horizontal narration”, in which dialogues and psychologizations are largely dispensed with. Nevertheless, “the story, in its grim nihilism, has something compelling. It is a disturbing coldness that this novella is made of. "For Fritz Göttler everything about Heather is " a great psychological thriller, in the tradition of Richard Yates and F. Scott Fitzgerald ", but also" a brutal study of American society ", “Sociology in Time Lapse”. Carmen Eller reads "a social drama that is not entirely clichéd," but above all a novel about obsessions. She reminds Bobby in particular of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum . For Jochen Overbeck, Weiner proves to be “an incredibly good dramaturge who works with scarce staff, but who leads them purposefully into disaster.” His main attraction is that the book ends in a completely different catastrophe than the reader expects.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Carmen Eller: A blowjob for a birthday . In: The time of November 9, 2017.
  2. ↑ a b c Fritz Göttler: A nightmare in the middle of Manhattan . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from November 25, 2017.
  3. ^ A b "Mad Men" inventor Weiner presents first novel . In: shz.de from November 28, 2017.
  4. ↑ James Lasdun: After 'Mad Men,' Matthew Weiner Turns to a Novel of Madmen . In: The New York Times of November 14, 2017.
  5. ↑ Review notes on Everything about Heather at perlentaucher.de
  6. ↑ Sandra Kegel : The fear that came from the cold . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 9, 2017.
  7. ↑ Jochen Overbeck: It will end badly . In: Spiegel Online from December 6, 2017.