Victoria Hannan's I Love the Whole World! is a wild, exuberant, deeply felt adventure. It is a novel with plenty of sadness but at least as much curiosity and openness to joy.
Hannan introduces Leslie McDonald in a moment of upheaval. Her husband of 24 years recently left her for his Alexander technique instructor, Kimberly. "The divorce was neither a surprise, nor not a surprise to Leslie," who "had let her life become so small that she couldn't see past the tediously flat, grid-like streets of her neighborhood" in Melbourne, Australia. She begins entering prize competitions and consequently finds herself booked on an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas for two people--but her best friend backs out. And so, in this novel's first 10 pages, Leslie flies to Las Vegas alone.
Leslie's extremely funny internal monologue is captivating; she tries mightily not to think of her ex-husband ("thinking about Dennis was like going to the dentist to get a filling"), considers all the different Leslies she could have been or might still become, and examines the United States with bemusement and, often, admiration. Even as she gradually allows herself to mourn the long years of her marriage in which she shrank herself, left off telling jokes, and abandoned her passion for art history, Leslie greets the unknown with earnestness and an endearing, childlike sense of wonder. She admires the desert and the Denver omelet, she sees the Grand Canyon and some of the land art she studied back in her university days, and she reconnects with an old friend, who says, "I've never met anyone with such an enormous capacity for delight.... It suits you."
Despite the pathos, Leslie makes wise and hilarious observations on perimenopause, societal expectations, Dennis's trajectory, and the prevalence of churches in small towns in the western U.S. "She wanted to know everything [about the tumbleweed]: its species, its origins. And where do they all go? Where were they tumbling to? Where was she tumbling to?" She suspends her skepticism and sincerely enjoys a magic show. Out of a life of quiet disappointment and passivity, she launches at first uncertainly and then with gusto into willful enjoyment for its own sake. In the glittery, neon, heavily themed Las Vegas strip, Leslie discovers whimsy, desire, and authenticity. "She felt joy fizzing through her veins as if her blood had been replaced with sherbet." By the end of I Love the Whole World!, enthusiasm for this astonishing novel will run to exclamation points too! --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: A recent divorcée wins an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas and embarks upon a hesitant and then delightful journey of self-discovery in this comical, inspirational novel.