Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet

From the Publisher

Written by the acclaimed author of My Happy Life and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, Everyone's Pretty is a savagely funny novel about the search for God, sex, and significance.

When he's not drinking himself into a stupor, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, or plotting his fame with a horny midget, Los Angeles pornographer Dean Decetes entertains messianic delusions and freeloads wantonly from his spinster sister. Distancing herself from her deadbeat sibling, Bucella obsesses over the quasi-religious love notes she writes to her boss and reassures a coterie of codependent coworkers, including a hygiene-phobic Christian Scientist and a depressive blonde bombshell named Alice. Next door, a teenage math genius has endured humiliation at the hands of her mother and is running away from home. She hightails it to a local dive and hooks up with Dean's editor from the porno magazine.

Told from five hilariously bizarre points of view, this novel serves up a fabulously florid cast of characters, many inspired by author Lydia Millet's two-year stint working at Larry Flynt Publications.

The Washington Post - sarah Weinman

Everyone's Pretty, Lydia Millet's fourth novel (following 2002's My Happy Life), succeeds remarkably (for the most part) at blending realism and escapism. Taken at surface level, its presentation of over-the-top characters placed in bizarre situations is supremely wacky, but underneath is an astute examination of how contemporary society fosters alienation and loneliness so acute that it takes outsized actions to allow any possibility of driving the demons away.

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