“Everything Changes” by Jonathan Tropper
Amusing…but that’s all
“Everything Changes” by Jonathan Tropper is an amusing book. I read it while I was on a plane to Paris and it certainly made my 9 hour-American Airlines’-‘room-less’-sleepless- coach ride bearable (but now that I think about it, it must’ve been my warm and fuzzy anticipation of my wife and I’s romantic gateway to the Love capital instead)…it left me with a ‘more to be desired than fully satisfied’ feeling…you know the one I’m talking about.
I have to admit- I find certain repulsion to the Topper’s comic-foreseeable resolution to the story. Why is that? Could it be due to my own acceptance of the uncertainly life has to offer, of the knowledge that beyond the happy Hollywood ending life does not necessarily proceed as planned? Perhaps that’s why I crave the attractiveness of Franzen’s melancholic finality, to the inherited page-soaked realism always with a touch of sadness and despair (life doesn’t hide its secrets in Franzen’s works; life is naked, exposed, real).
Topper’s character, a young professional who’s about to get married, finds out not only that he is in love with his best friend’s wife, that the blood in his urine is not caused by cancer (I never really found out what caused it), but that his estranged father is a lot more messed up than previously anticipated (fathering and then again dumping a 4th son for someone else to raise). In the end, like all who write in anticipation of capturing Hollywood producers’ attention, Topper sticks to the plan and never ventures to surprise the reader. The story ends with a bitter-sweet ‘everyone gets what they wanted in the first place’ account which was ‘what I didn’t want to read but was stuck in the plane’ reading.
- by Simon Cleveland
“Everything Changes” by Jonathan Tropper is an amusing book. I read it while I was on a plane to Paris and it certainly made my 9 hour-American Airlines’-‘room-less’-sleepless- coach ride bearable (but now that I think about it, it must’ve been my warm and fuzzy anticipation of my wife and I’s romantic gateway to the Love capital instead)…it left me with a ‘more to be desired than fully satisfied’ feeling…you know the one I’m talking about.
I have to admit- I find certain repulsion to the Topper’s comic-foreseeable resolution to the story. Why is that? Could it be due to my own acceptance of the uncertainly life has to offer, of the knowledge that beyond the happy Hollywood ending life does not necessarily proceed as planned? Perhaps that’s why I crave the attractiveness of Franzen’s melancholic finality, to the inherited page-soaked realism always with a touch of sadness and despair (life doesn’t hide its secrets in Franzen’s works; life is naked, exposed, real).
Topper’s character, a young professional who’s about to get married, finds out not only that he is in love with his best friend’s wife, that the blood in his urine is not caused by cancer (I never really found out what caused it), but that his estranged father is a lot more messed up than previously anticipated (fathering and then again dumping a 4th son for someone else to raise). In the end, like all who write in anticipation of capturing Hollywood producers’ attention, Topper sticks to the plan and never ventures to surprise the reader. The story ends with a bitter-sweet ‘everyone gets what they wanted in the first place’ account which was ‘what I didn’t want to read but was stuck in the plane’ reading.
- by Simon Cleveland
posted by Simon Cleveland @ 4:59 PM
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