Book review: Everything Lost, Everything Found
Adelaide author Matthew Hooton delivers an understated epic that unravels the hollow dreams of Henry Ford’s America in often-sweeping prose.
In his third and most daring novel, Matthew Hooton considers the shadows we leave behind in childhood, the memories that haunt us, and the complicated journey of returning home after adventure — set against the backdrop of Henry Ford’s very own Amazonian Neverland, Fordlandia.
Fittingly, Hooton opens the novel with an epigraph from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a work that echoes consciously through his own. Hooton, like Barrie, is concerned with shadows — how they attach to us as children and stay with us, breathing and playing an uncomfortable tug of war in adulthood. Hooton begins his story in the lush, chaotic spine of the Amazon jungle where his American-born protagonist, Jack, comes of age amidst hungry black caiman alligators, swashbuckling adventurers and the colonial, capitalist greed of Henry Ford’s industrial America.
Founded by Ford in the late 1920s as a rubber-producing capitalist utopia, in Hooton’s hands Fordlandia presents an uncanny shadow of Anytown USA’s white picket fences and apple pies on windows sills. It is a vision disrupted by the Brazilian jungle’s silent, impactful protests — giant fruit bats defecating on cowboy films, jaguars prowling in manicured flowerbeds, and unwelcome air that melts away imported hair gel. Here, Jack is engorged with promise, adventure, magic and stickiness as sweet as a golden papaya dripping through fingers. However, like Barrie, Hooton engulfs wonder and comfort into (literal) flames, unpicking at the seams of a fairytale, and unravelling a sinister, haunting promise: that all children must grow up.
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In adjacent chapters, Jack, some seven decades later, is stuck between the purgatory of Fordlandia and his current home in 1990s Muskinaw, Michigan, where Ford’s promises and greed has impacted his entire community. The American Dream is laid bare, as ‘survivors’ of Fordlandia and workers from Ford’s once fruitful factories are left disillusioned, homeless and discarded like spare parts from the cars they painstakingly put together years prior. Here, like C.S Lewis, Hooton considers what it’s like to step out of the wardrobe. That is, returning home from adventure, battle and adolescent glory, to a wasteland of empty dreams, promises and grief. Dealing with the failing health of his wife, Gracie, Jack reflects on this tug of war of shadows, echoing the lost Pevensie siblings of Narnia — or the boys who returned home from the Western Front as broken men — when he states “I am absent here because I am always there”.
Hooton’s work sees memories swept away with the tide — unexpected, delirious and painfully out of reach. The echoes reverberated through the book, like faint bird calls in the jungle, speak to his other texts Typhoon Kingdom (2019) and Deloume Road (2010), where the author also considers tragedy, childhood and tethers that at once seek to bind us and set us free. Hooton’s prose gleams with wonder — soft as a mother’s lullaby but as sharp as a tree hacking machete, intoxicating and dreamlike as the soft lulls of water that surround Jack both in childhood and old age.
Time, memory, the lost and found all find their place in this understated epic, where the author moves past the glory of returning home after adventure to reflect upon who the hero returns as — instead of providing a sweeping happily ever after. Here, Hooton captures the visceral discomfort, grief and beauty of the experiences that at once change, shape and echo softly into adulthood, as sobering realities emerge from the warm cocoon and increasingly tangled shadow of childhood.
Everything Lost, Everything Found by Matthew Hooton (HarperCollins Australia) is out now