As its title suggests, Everything You Need strives to be an all-encompassing book: a big, exhaustive, no-stone-unturned examination of the tidal rhythms of romantic and familial love, of professional accomplishment, self-respect and life passing into death and flowing back as memory. And for the most part, Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy's latest work of fiction, her third, succeeds magnificently. Her last novel, So I Am Glad (1995), drew its strength from its personality-saturated, first-person narration and its tight, claustrophobic mystery: was its hero, an amnesiac holed up in a Glasgow rooming house, really an incarnation of the seventeenth-century Frenchman, Cyrano de Bergerac? By contrast, Everything You Need employs an old-fashioned throng of eccentric characters and a bevy of narrative techniques to tell its tale. Like So I Am Glad, it is at heart a duet.

Author Nathan Staples lives with a handful of other fitfully suicidal writers on an island off the Welsh coast in a state of more or less constant misery. He pines for his estranged wife and daughter and writes popular slash-and-sex novels that he despises, confiding his despair to his best friend and editor, Jack, an artfully perverse seeker of alcoholic oblivion (Jack's scenes lend the novel its potent air of macabre ribaldry).

Hope, however, muscles its way into Nathan's life when his daughter Mary arrives on the island as a literary initiate, the only person unaware that her tutor is also her father. After her parents' marriage collapsed, Mary was raised by her Welsh “uncles,” her mother's brother and his male lover. Mary has turned out well: she is less of an emotional black hole than her father but also driven to sacrifice romantic happiness for her vocation. Ironically, her new proximity to Nathan occasions his own act of redemptive writing, a heartbreaking novel-within-the-novel that sets out to recapture for Mary, his imagined reader, the corrosion and bliss of his marriage to her mother.

Both father's and daughter's personal perspectives continually break through the omniscient narrative, which reads like a calm sea churned by conflict in the depths below. Kennedy's skill at maintaining the pas-de-deux narration keeps this very long work afloat and veins it with unsparing and wonderfully goofy humor. At times, however, the very intelligence of Mary's voice undermines the credibility of the plot: how can such a sharp-eyed young woman not realize that the man she is constantly sparring with and hugging is her father? (Any teacher-student relationship that involved this much physical contact, however Platonic, is hard to imagine without the requisite lawsuit.)

That said, Everything You Need more than keeps its title promise, not only in terms of its central, father-daughter dance, but in regard to its language and satellite stories as well. Kennedy's words are breath-catchingly original and only now and then (especially in the beginning) overcultivated, breathing life into a fertile supporting cast.

Some members of the latter are better stitched into the central story than others. Mary's “uncles” emerge as two of the most intimately and sympathetically observed characters in the book, but their abrupt dismissal from the text seems discordant. With the exception of the slimly sketched characters of Maura and Jonathan, father and daughter's respective once and future mates, all of the characters open doors to memorable images and insights. There is Louis, the historian, who provides the writers' island with its requisite mythology: Lynda, the “woman's novelist” who has sex with her vegetables—carrots and cucumbers preferred—before making soup from them; and the island's shaman, Joe, who sought truth in the desert only to find that great risk begets not infinite knowledge but the peace of personal limitation. Likewise, in its epic ebb and flow, Everything You Need takes great risks and succeeds on a scale unglimpsed in Kennedy's previous work—a landscape in which the only limitations are the emotional mantraps her characters set for themselves.