Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
Published 2018 · 272 pages · 68,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Literary Fiction
How hard is Everything Under to read?
Everything Under scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- Johnson crafts a private language for mother and daughter that readers must decode alongside the narrator. Canal boat vocabulary and invented words create an immersive but challenging linguistic environment.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences shift between dreamlike fragments and more conventional prose as Gretel moves between past and present. The style embodies the novel's themes of memory and language.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel works mythically while staying rooted in specific sensory details of canal life. Abstract questions about fate, language, and identity emerge through the retelling of classical myth.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Information arrives in fragments and riddles that gradually cohere. The mythic structure means some elements will land differently depending on your familiarity with Oedipus.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Memory and invention blur throughout. Gretel's reconstruction of her past may or may not be reliable, and the mythic parallels create a second layer of meaning beneath the surface narrative.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The canal, the invented language, the creature in the water—Johnson builds a dense symbolic field that rewards interpretation. The Oedipal template provides structure without determining meaning.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Johnson maintains some distance from her narrator's attempts to understand and control the past through storytelling. The gap between Gretel's lexicographer precision and her chaotic memories creates subtle irony.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Mythic inevitability drives toward revelation, but the novel's truths emerge in fragments that resist complete assembly. What actually happened remains productively uncertain.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Multiple timelines, the private language, the mythic substructure, and an unreliable narrator create significant structural challenges. The novel rewards rereading as pieces fall into place.
How Everything Under is regarded
Everything Under holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.