In All the Secrets of the World, all of Steve Almond’s many gifts as a writer and humanist are on full display. He uses the story of what happens to a fractured immigrant family’s encounter with a splintering wealthy established US family to explore a variety of issues in all of our lives. He sets the story during the Reagan presidency because so many of the social and political issues that haunt us today took flower at that time. As we’ve come to expect from Almond, his portrayal of these issues and the many and diverse (and beautifully drawn) characters who struggle through them is nuanced and, without exception, sympathetic.
I especially appreciated the artful way Almond reveals the essential ugliness of the Reagan presidency’s vilification and dismissal of poor people and people of color by ramping up fear of a dubious crime wave and the way political pressures effect people at every level to create a system of cruelty and oppression that persists to this day. His use of Nancy Reagan as a character is inspired in its insidious evil, providing us with comic relief that feels like a guilty pleasure.
And the writing is uniformly clear, precise, and in many many places absolutely gorgeous, from the descriptions of the desert landscape and its creatures to the philosophy-infused closing passages. The experience of being in the grip of a master of his craft for the length of the novel is a revelation, and leads one to ask “What the hell took you so long?” and “When can we see the next one?” |