We Can't Have Everything: A Novel

A sharp, witty portrait of desire and its disappointments, Rupert Hughes's 1917 novel follows Kedzie Thropp, a bright and bracingly naïve girl from a small town who arrives in New York City with stars in her eyes and a hunger for glamour. She's not merely chasing wealth, she's chasing a version of herself she believes exists only in the drawing rooms of the rich. But the city she finds is more complicated than she imagined. Jim Dyckman, a man suffocating under the weight of his own fortune, and Charity Coe Cheever, a woman whose volunteer work at a war hospital reveals both strength and hidden fractures, complicate Kedzie's assumptions about what the privileged actually possess. Hughes writes with incisive social satire, exposing the illusions both of those who have and those who want. The title rings with quiet irony: We can't have everything. The question the novel asks, with increasing urgency, is whether we even want what we think we want. For readers who enjoy early 20th-century social comedy with a bittersweet edge, or anyone who's ever mistyped want for need.