Book review: ‘Everything Is Going to Be Great’ by Rachel Shukert

Two memoirs before Rachel Shukert even turns 30? She swears this is not the epitome of narcissism, but then tells us, “I love looking at myself in the mirror.” And now, with the premiere of the much-anticipated movie “Eat Pray Love” but a few days away, Shukert’s “Everything Is Going to Be Great” feels like a younger woman’s version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller — that is, if Gilbert were a Jewish, twentysomething, girl-does-everything-she-shouldn’t survivalist.

When last we left Shukert, she was matriculating into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts at the end of her first memoir, “Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories.” In the opening of this second memoir, Rachel steps out into the world with a degree in acting. And the world is her oyster, an oyster recently harvested from the Gulf oil spill.

When Rachel lands a nonpaying, nonspeaking role in a play with a European tour, she doesn’t romp through Europe as a happy young woman should. Rachel thumps through Vienna, Zurich and Amsterdam as though she were sightseeing through a midlife crisis that started when she was 18. As she says, when she describes staying out every night until 4 a.m. with a group of “possible neo- Nazis,” “[w]e’re born sick, and life is the impossible struggle to get well.”

During the play’s run in Vienna, she dates a 46-year-old uncircumcised man (something new for this nice, sexually promiscuous Jewish girl), and then she begins to question his father’s 1940s police job. But, in Shukert’s unprotected “I just want someone to love me” way, she tells herself: “It didn’t seem fair to force someone to confront their family’s Nazi past until you’d been dating for at least six weeks.” Her relationships and couplings careen downhill at an indeterminate speed from there: Men repeatedly mistake her for a prostitute, a need for a dentist to replace her crown puts her in the throes of an Italian threesome, and a sociopath sways her into thinking she’s The One (only it turns out there’s more than one).

Shukert’s storytelling veers close to going over the edge — still, universality exists in all the raunchiness, which makes her brand of humor amusing. But here’s another talent Rachel, our terminally horny, accident-prone narrator, has that is unexpected: With the turn of a page, she can bring on the tears. Why waste good humor when the best trap it sets is to open up the heart of the reader to the widest swath of vulnerability? In one scene, she’s at a Christmas parade where a skinny Dutch Santa Claus and his elves are dressed in blackface, dancing an improvised jungle dance and wearing kinky wigs. When Shukert’s Dutch friends claim they are not racists like Americans, Rachel’s tale screeches around a corner (her own corner of denial) and she comes face-to-face with — let’s just say her shtick hits the fan.

Shukert’s humor has us clenching as though we’re rollerblading the Alps without kneepads and helmets, plus this book should be R-rated for its sexually mature (though “mature” would be a misnomer) scenes. We laugh out loud as if our best friend is sitting in a bar telling us wicked tales of her pursuits, then we tear up when she sits lonely in her hotel room eating mustard from a squeeze tube.

“Love is good,” Shukert tells us, “bad sex is a story” — but in the end “Everything Is Going to Be Great” is a love story. It’s a crazy, whacked-out love story in which the protagonist comes crashing head-on into herself, smack-dab into that mirror, and falls in love with more than just herself. Is memoir No. 3 on its way? I’ll wager instead she gets her own sitcom.

Wallen is the author of the novel “MoonPies and Movie Stars.”