Review: Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows
Everybody Knows: A Novel of Suspense by Jordan Harper. Faber & Faber, 2023. €9.49. 412 pages.
“In the Industry, if a man falls off a cliff, maybe he can climb back up—people will even stick their hands over the side to yank him to safety. But once a woman falls, she’s fallen for good. If she’s clinging to the edge, folk might stomp on her fingers just for the love of the game.” And Everybody Knows is all about the game. Mae, a black-bag PR girlboss who makes her millions covering up the darkest secrets of Hollywood, and Chris, an ex-cop getting by as a fist-for-hire, have plenty of stains on their souls. When a child abuse scandal reconnects them, they have a chance to clear their consciences—if they can stay alive long enough to get the truth out.
The novel is fast paced with snappy prose that really emulates the speed and intensity of a film, in spite of the novel’s rather large page count. This Hollywood atmosphere is reflected in the writing with Harper’s use of present tense: certain lines read like stage directions in a script (“she bites her bottom lip. She is wrestling with something big”) while sound effects are sometimes formatted in the same way (“GUNSHOTS”). I found this a really effective way of grounding the reader in the context of the novel.
One of the main issues explored by the novel is misogyny, particularly in the Hollywood context. This misogyny permeates the culture of the novel at every level. The women in Mae's office “wear winter coats” to combat the AC, calibrated to their sweaty boss’s preference; the assistants, “put on display in their cubicles”, “shove their feet into furred boots and sip coffee and bone broth. They try not to shiver as Cyrus passes”. Mae sees an elderly big shot with a young assistant in tow: “he grasps her forearm in just the wrong way … the girl is good, she keeps the shiver to her eyes”. Mae’s boss fabricates an affair between them to cover up a bigger secret – she describes the “jiujitsu of rejecting a man without hurting his pride. Deflection, spin-protect his ego at all costs. Never let the anger show”. He's taken aback when she says that “it will hurt her the way it always hurts women in the long run to sleep with their bosses … men don’t think it matters but it does”. The misogyny Mae witnesses and experiences professionally is only the half of it- what about the misogyny she perpetuates? After all, it’s her firm that got reporters to put the word moment in the phrase MeToo moment. “Because moments pass”.
Mae’s role in covering up Hollywood abuse scandals (and worse) allows the novel to further document these episodes of misogyny, and most readers will find they’re all too accurate. The novel’s mantra is “nobody talks, but everybody whispers”: for the novel to be published so soon after the “open secret” Russell Brand scandal is timely to say the least. One of the main antagonists of the novel is a “foot freak” producer for teen TV with a long history of child abuse, which echoes allegations against a certain Nickelodeon producer a little too closely. Add in a former child star turned addict turned health influencer named Lydia Lopez and the references are thinly veiled at best (though Gen-Z might not associate Lohan with anything other than that inner zen meme...) This world where “women are the party favours” and the monster behind it all will remain untouched seems at times like a satirical dystopia, but these allusions help Harper to really hammer in his point: the real world is that dystopian.
This message is clear in Harper’s portrayal of the police as well. Our resident ex-cop Chris tells us his time on the force taught him that “there’s all these invisible walls that keep everybody in line. And if you refuse to see them, they just aren’t there anymore”. He pockets drugs and cash from the people he’s sent to beat up: “cop habits die hard”. Cops tattoo themselves to show off their body count: “nobody calls them gangs”. Cops throw ragers to celebrate officer-involved shootings: “nobody calls it a kill party”. Death scene selfies, disappeared snitches, and workarounds on slurs paint a condemning picture, and once again it’s nothing we’re not seeing in the news.
This semi-dystopian undertone saturates more than just the novel’s themes: the language and imagery are steeped in it. Take the Hollywood setting - “everything is an echo of something else”. The LA traffic - “Chris tried to imagine what God would say to him … all he can hear is car horns”. Lavish green gardens in the desert: “a fuck-you to the gods … the sin of it only makes it more spectacular”. The gods get a lot of mention for such a degenerate novel, but more often than not it’s in reference to The Industry (capitalised always). Stylistically this definitely draws associations with urban fantasy and dystopian genres. Tent cities beside obscenely expensive restaurants proclaiming “consume to create / decolonize your palate / we cannot escape the violence inherent in eating” double down on this too.
You’ll either find the tone of this novel relatable and endearing or cringe and out of touch – some lines, like “she’s serving soft-butch supervillain” and “her vibe is manic pixie e-girl", read like a millennial's attempt to recreate a TikTok comments section, but the deluge of references to sponcon, tummy tea, and collagen supplements will ring true to anyone who uses social media at all. If you can overcome the “luxe vibes” (maybe Californians really do talk like this?), the novel does an astounding job of tapping into the strange atmosphere of the influencer era.
Advertised as an LA Noir and one of the best American crime novels of the year, I think Everybody Knows would really appeal to lovers of the dystopian genre as well (though what that says about the world I dread to consider). It’s timely—and depressing in its timeliness—but astute. The writing is clever while easy to speed through, which can’t be said for too many novels, so as long as you can bear the few lines where it’s obvious that an adult man is trying to write teen girl dialogue, I’d add this to your reading list.
