...the whole thing has the air of a modern-day folk tale, rather in the manner of Neil Jordan’s The Dream of a Beast or Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood ... The pointillist brush-strokes with which Weiner fills in the early pages are done with wonderful subtlety and a sharp, dry wit, many instances of which will only register on a second reading – and this is a book that must be read twice ... Weiner knows how to tell a story, and how to twist its tail until it cries out in pain ... Heather, the Totality is horribly coercive; it is also an oblique diagnosis of the sickness at the heart of contemporary America, a nation bloated on liberal middle-class complacency and seething with the rage and paranoia of its neglected ones. Here is Trump-land in all its madness and its pathos. As Tony Soprano would say: whaddaya gonna do?
In the early pages of this fragmented work, readers might assume Weiner’s project will be the mirthful undoing of Mark and Karen Breakstone, who are as insecure as they are spoiled. With the introduction of Robert ‘Bobby’ Klasky, Weiner strips the story of its luxurious gloss … Bobby’s fixation on adolescent Heather is a major source of the novel’s tension; however, Weiner’s seemingly uncomplicated prose is rich with subtext. The language is infused with the Breakstones’ tacit critiques … Weiner seems less interested in the idea of totality as wholeness — readers see only a few years of Heather’s life — but of total eclipse. At times, Heather is impossible to see, caught between Mark’s protective scrutiny and Bobby’s sinister watch, in this dark, intelligent debut.
Given that Mad Men was routinely referred to as ‘a televised epic novel,’ you'd expect that Weiner's foray into literary fiction would be pretty good — and it is … As he did throughout Mad Men, Weiner also deftly exposes the weirdness of mundane life changes: the transformation of a chatty toddler into a shut-down adolescent; the sudden shifting of alliances among closed groups, whether they be ad agencies or nuclear families … Heather, The Totality doesn't break any new ground stylistically; instead, it chillingly reminds us of how unstable the ground is that we take for granted beneath our feet.
...Weiner has turned to the form he’s helped speed toward redundancy, for his latest project, Heather, the Totality ...a brisk, undemanding read, with alternating sections on the family (rich, tame) and the Worker (poor, psychopathic) creating an efficient mechanism of suspense ...the book also seems seriously at odds with itself, in all kinds of ways ... Despite this expository abundance, the characters remain oddly vague ... There’s almost no showing in the entire book; little real-time action or direct speech. You keep waiting for a fully imagined scene with the kind of immersive detail that persuades you of the reality... It holds your attention, but it doesn’t leave you with much.
Heather, the Totality can best be described as a simplistic, cold portrayal of flawed, repellent people. Any reader picking up the book in the hopes of finding Weiner’s gorgeous portraits of human frailty will be disappointed, but grateful the story runs just 144 pages … There is the kernel of a good idea in this idea of parents becoming fanatically obsessed with their children, but Weiner spoils it with the general awfulness of Mark and Karen and the side story of Bobby, who, predictably, begins to obsess about Heather in an unhealthy way … So what is this story about, if it is not a satire? It’s unclear.
Heather, the Totality may be a slender work (technically more novella than novel), but it packs an impressive amount of drama and excitement into its 138 pages. A bleakly elegant tale of ennui and class envy, it reads – perhaps not altogether surprisingly – less like a novice effort than the work of a highly accomplished fabulator … Despite being set in the present day, this is a novel that owes much atmospherically to those American works of the 1960s – notably Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and John Williams’s Stoner – that treat family life, and especially marriage, as one unfolding catastrophe. Weiner complicates matters, however, by introducing a more noirish element: a subplot about an amoral and dangerous young man named Bobby … Overall, this novel captivates, despite the grimness of its preoccupations. Weiner has a knack for writing sentences that grab and grip, and he knows a lot about pacing and structure.
Heather, the Totality is a short and brutal novel, with a noirish central nervous system that is tense and fraught … Each paragraph of this novel is framed for emphasis and drama by quite a bit of white space. Almost everything we learn, we are told and not shown. The result is a fable-like text so primed for disaster that I found myself thinking of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, about the Titanic. Yet despite its unvaried tone of impending catastrophe, this debut novel still surprises … There are moments of sharp insight in this short book — unexpected, tender things said with little or no emphasis, chiefly about motherhood and the echoes of disillusion and neglect passing through the generations — that linger long and hard.
This is a story from Mad Men creator and writer Matthew Weiner, and fans of his iconic TV show know it can’t be that simple. Spoiler alert: It isn’t … Weiner tells Bobby’s story in parallel to the Breakstones’, switching back and forth between both narratives at an almost breathless pace. The novel seems to be building toward an inevitable, brutal end, and it is—just not in the way you might think. Heather, the Totality is a sharp, slim page-turner, though much simmers underneath the surface of Weiner’s deft prose.
...the novel’s eccentric and often clumsy style, its tumbling clauses, fugitive commas, run-on sentences, and oddities of punctuation. It’s a decent approximation of the inner monologue of a precocious 14-year-old girl, but most of the novel reads this way and isn’t told from Heather’s perspective ... Each of the three adults wishes, in his or her own way, to possess the girl, a desire that makes it impossible for any of them to know her. Unfortunately, the parts of the novel told from her perspective make their fascination hard to share. Heather, like her parents and the man who spies on her, is described so generically that she never comes into focus ... he abandons almost entirely the storytelling tools that are the forte of every good screenwriter: dialogue and dramatic scenes. The action, the background, and the characters’ inner lives are conveyed not through conversation or conflict but by summarizing sentences ... What is Weiner up to? Am I kidding myself in trying to read more into this book than meets the eye? I finished Heather, the Totality as most of us finished watching Mad Men: scratching my head.
He may or may not have felt it to be, but his first novel, Heather, the Totality, has a rare effortlessness and command of the mechanics of fiction ...has a fable-like clarity and economy, but also the unsettling psychological penetration one would find in James, Patricia Highsmith, or Graham Greene, one of the late 19th- or 20th-century masters of cognitive vivisection ...the novel’s mood shifts and bends; it modulates into notes that are pensive, melancholy, often stringent, occasionally warm; and its ending manages to be at once harrowing and disturbingly contemplative ...spare, almost skeletal; there’s almost no dialogue, and very little visual description, two things one might expect from a seasoned television writer. Instead, there is a relentless interiority, a patient strobing of first one person’s consciousness, and then the next ...an unqualified success.
Spanning decades within a little more than 100 pages, it tells a basic story in an increasingly perilous context. It intends to grab you, hold you, and never let you go — but it never really does ... Working in such a small storytelling space and with so many swirling elements, there’s precious little room for error here. This proves untenable. Weiner’s drawing of Bobby, for starters, is offensively off-base: The book indulgently examines his homicidal nature with doses of poverty porn, yet he’s merely used to establish contrasts of class and stability. Further, the breakdown of the Breakstone marriage, which takes up most of the action, is chronicled without distinctiveness. That these stories are paralleled throughout is an almost jarringly cynical choice. Weiner’s style is neither comic nor empathic nor particularly insightful; the narrative plods forward with simplistic characterizations that grow tiresome, and flabby sentences mistaken as artfully unformed ... In its empty cynicism, there’s simply too little to feel or to contemplate; in more ways than one, Heather, the Totality marks a pretty thin debut.
The stylistic and thematic forebears seem to be Richard Yates and John Cheever, —and also Weiner’s touchstones for the story of Don Draper—although neither of them were ever this awkwardly pulpy, and Weiner’s Raymond Carver-on-crack style (which is to say, Raymond Carver on sedatives) reads like minimalistic realism stretched to the point of parody ... Were one to write out a list of attributes that defined Mad Men—nuance, subtlety, complexity of character, an ability to convey its people and its setting through small gestures and details—Heather is the antithesis of that list. This is so completely true that it has to have been a deliberate decision, even if it wasn’t a successful one ... Heather reads like the outline to another story, one that would probably be effective, if it had the Mad Men attention to detail.
At 134 pages, Matthew Weiner's Heather, The Totality is best consumed in one bite like those exquisite pastries that line the cases of the French bakery/cafes on Manhattan's Upper East Side ... Weiner writes with maximum economy. The book practically reads like a screenplay, down to its eccentric capitalization. Characters are sketched in quickly, with just the right amount of detail to delineate a type ... Beyond its chilling portrait of America's social and economic divide, the novel raises a number of thorny questions: whether a 'good' man could be a killer. Whether a 'bad' man might be transfigured. How everyone, rich and poor alike, is complicit in their fate and trapped in their delusions. And how no one ever gets off scot-free.
Heather, the Totality is about a father murdering a man who he (correctly) suspects wants to rape his daughter, the titular Heather ...whole book seems incapable of imagining her as anything besides an object upon whom men might prove their masculinity ... Both of these fantasies are specifically rooted in masculinity, and in proving one’s masculinity by exerting power over or performing violence on or around women ...what really makes Heather, the Totality a failure of a novel is that it does not succeed in moving beyond the self-indulgent appeal of the fantasy and granting Heather her own personhood ... Heather remains an object to such a pointed extent that it begins to seem as if that’s the only way the fantasy can really work: Heather needs to be an object for her father to be a hero.
Matthew Weiner’s debut novel, Heather, the Totality, is creepy, unsettling, strange, violent and queasily seductive ...really a novella, told in a fever pitch ... What if the girl’s father had witnessed that look? Weiner let his imagination go from there. The riveting result will fascinate some readers and repel others. Either way, you keep turning the pages, as tension and dread steadily mount ...very little dialogue in the book, which has a tell-not-show narrative that defies convention but mostly works. Weiner’s screenwriter credentials shine brightest in his sharply focused character snapshots ...deeper than a mere thriller.
With Heather, The Totality, his first foray into traditional fiction, Weiner explores — and presses at the boundaries of — a new form, while simultaneously burrowing deeply into his recurring concerns ...Weiner doesn’t build on this approach, or embrace the novel form’s inherent potential for expansiveness. Instead, Heather, The Totality is a powerful, minimalist work...prose is razor-fine, largely eschewing ornamentation in favour of propulsive forward motion ...largely expository, rather than rooted in fully-developed scenes. The result is a novel almost defiantly told, rather than shown ...the narrative approach results in a sense of detachment, almost flatness, which Weiner plays to devastating impact late in the novel, free of sentimentality, almost vicious in its clear-eyed sensibility.
...a slim volume that reads like a cautionary fairy tale of contemporary parenting … Weiner gets into the heads of these not-very-interesting people, letting them share their feelings with readers in ways they can’t with one another. Just when a reader may be wondering whether anything will ever happen, Heather becomes a teen and inevitably clashes with her possessive mother … The style Weiner employs in Heather, the Totality is distinctive but odd, with many characters referred to as capital-M Mother or capital-W Worker, as if they were archetypes, or creatures from an Aesop fable. This never gets less disconcerting.
Weiner’s award-winning writing and producing of such renowned television shows as The Sopranos and Mad Men is neatly evident in his quietly thrilling debut novel. Written in descriptive and illuminating scene-like snippets — though nearly free of dialogue — this one-sitting read concerns the eerily shared delusions of a privileged Manhattan family and a man who stalks the periphery of their lives ... The sense of doom is sharply rendered, characters are well developed, and their motivations are finely wrought. Readers will hope for more book-form fiction from Weiner.
...in this slender but searingly intense novella, Heather, The Totality, he finds a nailbiting drama that suits his storytelling skills. In a series of 211 short paragraphs divided into five parts, he provides electrifying vignettes that bring together four disparate lives in Manhattan ...everything is downhill and Weiner exploits every element of suspense, working toward a conclusion that has been intricately prepared for with minute details throughout the novella ...Weiner embraces Edgar Allan Poe’s basic tenet of mysteries: that everyone is capable of murder ...perhaps best binge-read in its totality in one sitting.
Clearly there’s a reason these stories are being told side by side, and it cannot be good. As the plot plummets terrifyingly toward God knows what, the highly stylized sentences have a headlong energy of their own … The creator of Mad Men makes his fiction debut with a noirish novella designed to be read in one hair-raising session.
...a finely honed tale that highlights class conflict. Mark Breakstone, a Manhattan financier, and his charming wife, Karen, may not quite be able to afford a penthouse apartment, but the couple have a wonderful daughter, Heather, who grows to be a beautiful teen, smart and full of empathy for others … Convinced of his superiority over everyone, Bobby chooses the alluring Heather, whom he first spots on a Manhattan rooftop from an adjoining building where he’s doing construction work, as the victim of his rape, torture, and murder fantasy, which he plans to carry out in the real world. Weiner somewhat telegraphs his final twist, but the results of that twist may still surprise.
