In Everything You Need, Mary Lamb -- getting her hind legs as an author at age 19 -- ships off for a seven-year stint at Foal Island, a writers' colony combining the salient features of a summer camp and a cult compound. She does not know that her mentor is her long-absent father, Nathan Staples, a Famous Author who comes complete with suicidal depression, an alcoholic editor, and a bouncy dog so loyally literary that he has interior monologues (e.g., ''meat want''). Actually, A.L. Kennedy -- doing something to balance the cloyingness of this thick fairy tale -- gives all the principals interior monologues, exposing their base needs and grand illusions. The author doesn't so much develop a plot as simply put characters in proximity to death, offering exact and musical descriptions of the motions of the living soul.
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