In this multilayered and masterfully structured book, Laing obsessively examines the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (a protege of Freud), drawing connections to other intellectuals, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, while including stories from her own life ... There’s no path Laing is afraid to explore. She writes about the sick body, imprisoned bodies, bodies that protest, the sexual body, bodies that have experienced acts of violence—illuminating the strengths and the weaknesses of the corporeal form ... Reading Everybody, it’s impossible to turn away from all the pain that has been inflicted on bodies ... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future.
Talk about timely: Laing began writing about bodies under siege over five years ago, and the book is being published in the middle of a pandemic. But we have become newly aware of the vulnerabilities of our bodies in the past year in other ways ... she mixes biography, memoir, psychology and art criticism to create a treasure trove of cultural curiosities and political ideas ... Laing makes an entertaining tour guide, moving like a magpie through art, history and politics, and accumulating an exhilarating set of connections ... This is Laing’s most personal book yet – she talks about her own gender identity, going on Buddhist camping retreats with an ex-boyfriend, and her years as a climate activist. But it’s her ability to describe her own experience of looking at artworks that really illuminates her topics ... It’s an ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum, like going on a funfair ride with a very clever friend.
... brims with empathy. Never condescending or unkind, Laing explores the experiences of those crushed by feckless cruelty, shaken by cancer, or crazed by their impulses to eke out possibility, meaning and joy — all to achieve a semblance of freedom ... Laing teases out similarities and contrasts that deliver sizzling insights ... Laing has written a piercing book. That she has no final answer to the problem of freedom does not detract from her achievement. Indeed, she encourages us all to ask new questions to discover how it feels, and what it means, to be free — queries that are as vital as they are resistant to any single answer.
Everybody pulls liberally from Reich’s biography, but the doctor belongs more to the book’s form than to its content: his narrative provides the hard factual shell into which Laing can pour her ideas. Everybody is, per the title, an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated. The book skips over traditional sites of interest, such as health or appearance, to explore questions of force and constraint, and how, more abstractly, our physical forms can shove us into conceptual categories ... The book proceeds, via an almost dreamlike, permutative logic, from the body as prison to the body in prison to masses of bodies in prison to masses of bodies in protest. At the end, we are released on a note that is either utopian or dryly ironic ... Everybody possesses a looseness, richness, and abundance of originality. One does not expect a political study to perform such sharp close readings of art and literature, or to describe emotions so elegantly. Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline; if that precision is lacking on the level of her highest-order argument, the sense of unfinished business that lingers is its own pleasure ... In the end, I found myself wishing not for less but for more. Laing engages so richly with the body’s confinement that the 'freedom' part of her book feels under-theorized ... I would have loved to see Laing extend her study of the fascist state to the democratic polity, to the ways in which our many small liberties are adjudicated to produce a collective one.
The formula works for her ... She adopts a similar approach – an adeptly braided mix of cultural criticism, biography, and memoir – to explore the body from multiple perspectives, most particularly as a potential locus of freedom in what continues to be a constricted world ... Reich did try to change the world, but then the world beat him down. He is at the heart of Laing’s investigations, but her course also takes her through the lives and work of others who tried – and so often failed – to find bodily freedom ... As a writer, she does what she does extremely well, tripping lightly over her meld of genres, unafraid of independent thought and criticism, but unafraid, also, of nuance, uncertainty, and empathy for polarising characters such as Reich, Dworkin, even Freud ... She reminds me, that way, of a writer such as Maggie Nelson, turning her considerations around and round, holding them up, looking at them in the light.
Given the vast, pervasive relevance of its subject, freedom, Olivia Laing’s new book about it is appropriately big—in scope, in reach, in feeling ... travels buoyantly through a rich swathe of cultural history to investigate bodily freedom and its curtailments: from illness and pain to the methods we take to relieve them, from state-sanctioned violence to the freedom movements that have emerged to resist it, from gender injustice to sexual liberation. It’s a formidable undertaking, one that Laing executes savvily, her plainly diligent research synthesized in lucid, coolly urgent prose ... These and other moments of autobiographical writing—including scenes of her life in the climate-justice movement—augment and personalize her analysis. But mostly, as she does in her other books, Laing focuses on the biographies of others ... For all its big-minded large-heartedness, Everybody advances with a curious, even endearing modesty. Though this book does both, Laing is more concerned with excavating insights from her subjects’ astonishing lives than she is with supplying us with a new framework for theorizing freedom. Indeed, she seems aware that her claims about freedom are rarely surprising ... a cool touch, compelling a stirring vitality.
Laing steadily built her reputation as an editor and writer with an earnest sophistication. She doesn’t make her mark with arch observations or cool reserve. Her enthusiastic criticism is fueled by a political and humane connection as well as an aesthetic and intellectual one ... Everybody concentrates with exuberance on bodies as a means to riddle out the expression and performance of freedom. Through protest, suppression, illness, sex, and movement, human bodies are a battleground for freedom ... Through careful study of the lives and deaths of artists and activists such as Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone, Laing uncovers Reich’s influence beyond his lifetime into the civil rights movement as well as the gay and sexual liberation movements of the 20th century ... What surfaces are the mechanisms of shame and glory that inform radical engagement ... Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation.
[A] well-intentioned yet ultimately exasperating book that would have been well served by the very thing it resists: clarifying constraints ... While Reich’s work is most relevant to discussions of illness and sexual repression, while his experiences in Vienna and with the F.D.A. shed some light on the power of the state over the masses, Reich simply isn’t speaking to everyone in these pages ... Without this connective tissue, much of Laing’s analysis relies on transitional phrases that quickly sum up the topic at hand in order to move along to the next. But with so many ends to tie, Laing oversimplifies, relying on tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase that are ill suited to the gravity of her subjects ... Laing has simply taken on too much for these 300 pages — too many subjects, too little space or structure within which to consider them. It is particularly disappointing because she is usually so adept at drawing together the subtle vibrations of individual lives and making them hum ... while Laing attempts to assemble the many voices she has marshaled, willing the chorus to sing a hopeful tune, she has so severed the bonds between them that their collective song fails to resonate. It’s as if they each sit, alone, in a room somewhere, waiting for the moment when we will all be free.
... exhilarating ... Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. But she is too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the body comes to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime it’s trying to escape ... a series of dazzling forays into painting ... This is an expansive book, bold in scope and speculative range, an invitation to ongoing conversation rather than bland assent. In that conversational spirit, I would venture a different view of the dynamic between freedom and control animating the book ... Yet Laing’s Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear-eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that horizon seems always to be vanishing. And this tension, between defiant hope and sober realism, only enriches her intensely moving, vital and artful book.
Everybody: A Book About Freedom finds Laing taking a similar approach as she masterfully shares stories of fascinating artists and historical figures ... Her net, in short, is breathtakingly, ambitiously wide. Her stakes could not be higher—freedom for all bodies ... a nonpareil study that delights the intellect.
... compelling ... Deftly grappling with Reich’s failures alongside his 'obviously more fertile ideas', Laing charts the impact of his ideas on her own life and values, and finds a line connecting the revolutionary impulse of Reich to the emancipatory movements of feminism, gay liberation and US civil rights that shaped the second half of the 20th century.
Intrepid cultural critic Laing (The Lonely City, 2016) conducts incisive inquiries into complex subjects by assembling a galaxy of innovators with whom to commune. Here she takes a tangible approach to freedom by focusing on how our bodies ... Laing’s finely crafted blend of incisive memoir and biography vitalize this unique chronicle of the endless struggle 'to be free of oppression based on the kind of body' one inhabits, a work of fresh and dynamic analysis and revelation.
... a beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom, which uses Reich’s ideas to chart the forces that shape and limit bodily freedom today ... Some readers might be glad that Laing finished writing this book before the Covid-19 pandemic was fully under way ... But equally, given the book concerns itself with the relationship between the body, illness and freedom, the connections between our physical and our imaginative lives, it feels bizarre to read no mention of a public health crisis that has completely transfigured our politics...the ways in which it has forced each of us to confront our bodily vulnerability and interdependence. Yet Laing makes only fleeting reference to contemporary events, and this, coupled with her willingness to embrace ambiguity, to leave difficult questions unresolved, can make this book feel politically detached ... For all the boldness and ambition of the subject matter, this book feels curiously tentative. Laing is an elegant, precise writer, and yet her conclusions are vague ... reading Everybody hasn’t helped me see...any more clearly.
Laing is exploring strategies to unravel the binomial view of physicality: life or death, freedom or confinement, health or illness. She argues that only by looking beyond these dualities can one begin to understand what freedom means. ... The conversation changes as Everybody progresses, reflecting the liquidity that Laing investigates.
The author dedicates the book to 'bodies in peril,' from individuals impacted by the European migrant crisis of 2015, to everyone impacted by COVID-19. It’s a statement that showcases the balance that runs throughout this book, with a recognition of how vulnerable we are, especially when our bodies belong to categories treated as disposable ... There are moments in this book that may feel too theoretical; yet, when Laing explores and expresses the ways in which our bodies are full of power, she offers a form of support we could all use more of as we navigate our own bodies and relearn what it means to value them. This is worthwhile, reflective reading.
Reflecting on her fraught sense of embodiment, Laing creates a penetrating examination of the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies as well as the relationships of bodies to power and freedom ... Laing reveals in visceral detail society’s terror 'of different kinds of bodies mixing too freely' and envisions a future in which that terror no longer exists. Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring.
Novelist and critic Laing (Crudo) places the life and legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at the center of this impassioned and provocative study ... Detours into the lives of Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Sontag, and Nina Simone illuminate the influence of Reich’s theories ... This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes.
