James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have


Give Me Everything You Have is "the story of Lasdun's victimization by a crazed former student who accused him of everything from stealing parts of her novel to being a philanderer and a rapist."

The first hundred pages contain utterly riveting prose and a cohesive story thrilling in its modernity but extended asides such as those on D.H. Lawrence and Sir Gawain should have been cut or drastically reduced. As the WSJ says, "the book peters out with Mr. Lasdun visiting the Western Wall while on a magazine assignment in Jerusalem. Somehow he manages to conflate the balled-up messages to God that the faithful wedge into crevices in the wall with Nasreen's missives into cyberspace. It is easy to imagine him scribbling down his own message for the Western Wall, something along the lines of: "Deliver me from my tormentor." But even divine intervention is no sure bet in our age of cyber anarchy."

Also highly unsatisfying: zero resolution. The stalking contiues even as the book ends, making it feel either prematurely published or simply a gambit for a sequel.