THE AMERICAN NO

In a book of autobiographical short stories, Everett exhibits the same rakish charms as a writer that he shows as an actor but also reveals a deep streak of romanticism.

The title refers to the way film pitches are rejected in Hollywood: after loud initial enthusiasm, silence. No stranger to the phenomena, Everett blithely announces, via the narrator of “Hare Hare,” that he has turned his rejected ideas “into a book of short stories” and goes on to describe a meeting with director John Schlesinger with precision and fatalistic insouciance. While discussing a film the two were making together (presumably The Next Best Thing, 2000), Schlesinger dismisses Everett’s suggestion for a funeral scene, a tragicomic story Everett now tells to establish his book’s purposeful blurring of memory and invention along with its themes of exile and lost family. Even when Everett struts his signature jaded wit—particularly in a story about a band of Hollywood losers with questionable scruples whose act of creepy desperation inadvertently turns them into successful entrepreneurs shilling “deals in fertilization”—what resonates is loneliness offset by flickering moments of connection. The longer, less glibly polished stories show more sincere emotional commitment. In “The Last Rites,” based on a fictionalized combination of his great-grandmother and Margaret Wheeler, a woman who mysteriously survived India’s First War of Independence in 1857, Everett writes a poignant almost-ghost story about a British woman stuck in India in a bad marriage. The description of India is haunting, the ending strained. Similarly, Everett’s story of a shipboard romance between a British man and Greek woman emigrating to Australia after World War II combines heart-wrenching characters with an earnest, even sentimental plot. There are stories about the lives and works of two gay literary icons, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. Throughout, though the plots can sometimes feel contrived, Everett renders scenes in vivid, often moving detail.

Quirky, uneven, but enchanting.