This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper - a Book Review

You know your life is falling apart when you walk in to surprise your spouse with a birthday cake, and instead she surprises you with her infidelity.

And it's with your boss.

For Judd Foxman, his life is only beginning to circle the drain. On the verge of divorce, unemployed and living in a basement apartment trying to figure out his next move, the hits keep on coming for Judd when his father dies from cancer and he must go back home to honor his father's last dying wish, and sit shiva with the rest of his family.

Jonathan Tropper's "This is Where I Leave You", navigates the dynamics of a dysfunctional family through the first person account of Judd, a man approaching middle age, whose life has unraveled to the point where he questions and mourns the optimism and innocence of his youth. Judd's tone - and by default, Tropper's tone - is rightfully bitter and curdled. Judd's family is not a close-knit unit. Sentiment, emotion and support are alien to the Foxman household. Not that there is a lack of love or caring, it's just buried under layers of familial regrets that the years have fermented into sarcastic banter, passive aggressive digs and slingshot insults. It's the only way the Foxmans can and will relate to each other.

Judd's siblings each have their own neuroses and warped histories. Paul, once a rising star in Baseball, is trying to have a baby with his wife Alice. With a promising professional baseball career cut short at a young age by an unfortunate and very savage pit bull attack, Paul went into the family business to run his father's chain of Sporting Goods stores. Wendy is a mother of three who seems to think that the compromises in her own life afford her the right to be insultingly honest about others. And Phillip, the youngest of the Foxman brood, is not only the most physically attractive member of the family, but he's also its most troubled and lost. Sometimes traveling, sometimes in jail or disappearing for weeks or months at a time, Philip is a womanizing wastrel who brings his 44 year old fiance and ex-therapist to sit shiva with him.

Judd's mother is a famous author who wrote a book on parenting and the irony is not lost on Judd that his mother's own parenting wisdom translated poorly in the rearing of her own family. Tropper does an excellent job drawing his characters with peccadilloes and flaws without forgetting to add the redeeming qualities that make them unmistakably human. Still, the observations can be intensely cynical, alternating between heartbreaking, riotously funny and sometimes just plain depressing. And sometimes they can be all three at once, as when Judd describes the moment he first finds his wife in bed with Wade, his snarky, alpha male boss who hosts a popular radio talk show. The scene is sexually graphic. Tropper spares no detail, but he also captures the absurdity, shock and searing betrayal of witnessing the love of one's life in bed with another person. Suffice it to say, Judd loses his job following an incident that involved cramming a lit birthday cake up his boss' bum. You have to read it to believe it.

Tropper definitely has a knack for writing scenes with a droll, dramatic flair. However, these over the top moments should have been kept to a minimum. Too many of these scenes were just plain gratuitous, and worse, it lends a contrived feel to the proceedings, as if Tropper had more calculated designs to shop his book for a Hollywood film treatment. A fight between Wade and Judd didn't need to become physical, then turn philosophical on a dime. It just doesn't happen that way in real life - just in the movies. Additionally, I saw no need for a dinner to be ruined by Wendy's toddler hurling poop onto someone's dinner plate. Even sneaking a joint in the synagogue turns into a three alarm catastrophe that didn't need to be.

Tropper fares better when he lets Judd just simply observe how depressingly awry his life has gone. Just take this little nugget that encapsulates the facile, witty, yet savagely sarcastic and hopeless tone Tropper wields with aplomb:

"There is nothing more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It's the one time of the day where I feel like I have options."

Each chapter is divided in the seven days it takes for shiva to conclude. Whether guests come and go like the tide, paying their respects, hitting on Judd's cougar mother, or bringing trays of food, Judd comments on everything - the endless parade of people, the absurdity of religious ritual and the unusual comfort it can sometimes provide. And in this backdrop, there's a lesbian revelation, an unexpected pregnancy, and an unlikely, practically bizarre sexual coupling between two unlikely characters (another moment that strains credulity, unfortunately). Without ruining all the fun, Judd must ultimately make a choice. Tropper makes sure that the Foxman clan confront each other with varying degrees of success and failure, but there's no happy ending as much as there's just a mild sense of optimism and then business as usual. If you refer to the title of the book, any other way to end "This is Where I Leave You" would leave the reader feeling cheated.

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Sources:
This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper, Dutton Adult Publishing (2009)