This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

When this novel appeared in a BookBub email, I scooped it up for a couple of bucks, and then found out I was reading one of the funniest novels I've ever read. I don't know if the sarcasm was just what I needed or if the classic family dysfunctions were just so insightful, but I really laughed a lot during this quick read. In three days I read about a seven day shiva, where our narrator, Judd, goes home to grieve the loss of his father on the heels of grieving the loss of his wife, Jen,who he found in his bed with his obnoxious boss. So he's a sympathetic narrator but also a bright, witty observer. During these seven days the three brothers and one sister hash out old grudges and invent some new ones. "In my family, we don’t so much show more air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative." Somewhere underneath there is a realized undertone of love and caring but during most of the storyline the traded barbs along with the observational insights of the author make for an entertaining getaway from our Carona virus containment.

Some lines:
Now Dad is dead and Wendy is cracking wise.
It serves him right, since he was something of a pioneer at the forefront of emotional repression

He is the Paul McCartney
of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.

I was thirty-four years old and homeless, lying awake in the dead of night on a lumpy sofa bed in a rented basement, listening to my landlords piss and shit while my former wife and former boss sixty-nined in my head. Rock bottom rose up to meet show less

"Dad lives on in all of us. Our parents can continue to screw us up even after they die, and in this way, they're never really gone."

Filled with humor and insight but also drama and family dysfunction, this is an interesting look into one family. Siblings, four of them, are coming home to honor the final will of their father - to sit for seven days and have people visit and mourn with them, to sit and mourn their father and be together.

I loved the drama and the humor. I loved the dynamics the family had, to finish each other's sentences. I loved the silly neighbors that arrived and how Judd (MC) gave his perspective of who the neighbor was when he was young and who they were now. I even loved all their childhood friends showing up and show more them trying to pick through their emotions and lives as it crumbled around them.
It's a very good story. I'll definitely read more from this author. show less

Do you recall the Great #Franzenfruede Debate of 2010? One of the points brought up in that discussion was that certain fictional subject matter seems to be viewed differently depending on whether it’s written by a man or a woman. In making one of her arguments, Jennifer Weiner mentioned that male authors who cover the territory of “domestic" or "relationship" fiction don't seem expected to choose between commercial and critical success the way female authors are, and one of the examples she cited was Jonathan Tropper.

Tropper’s last novel, This is Where I Leave You, got a pretty good reception from bloggers when it was published and has been on my Kindle for months. When I found a break in my reading schedule recently, I decided show more its time to be read had come. And Weiner’s not wrong; the domestic upheavals and family dysfunction that Tropper details in his story of a week with the Foxman family do seem to be more typically found in fiction written by women. However, the character viewpoint from which the story is told, and the humor and style with which it’s told, sounded pretty male to me, and I mean that in a very good way.

Men and women tend to react differently to infidelity, and Judd Foxman’s reaction to the discovery that his wife has been carrying on an extended affair with his boss is a man’s reaction; he walks out on her, but not before inflicting bodily harm on the other guy with a lighted birthday cake. The losses of his marriage and his job are soon followed by the loss of his father, who left a surprising last request: he wanted his widow and children - who have been indifferently Jewish for years - to come together in the family home and sit shiva for him. The week of enforced togetherness among the four adult Foxman children and their outspoken celebrity-psychiatrist mother stirs up family business both old and new - after all, conventional wisdom suggests that a psychiatrist’s kids may be especially messed up - and serves to demonstrate that some families get along better when they don’t see each other very often.

There are places where the novel is laugh-out-loud funny, and places where it feels emotionally true; in some places, it’s both. The narration is in Judd’s voice, and I liked and empathized with him; I liked most of the characters, actually, even though some weren’t terribly likable. And I may be stereotyping, but I thought that the role sex plays in the book marks it as fiction produced by a male. It’s not particularly graphic, but it is frequently on character’s minds, shaping their perceptions, and in their conversations; also, the way it’s perceived and talked about is pretty matter-of-fact, which strikes me as more of a male approach to the subject, and one I was surprisingly comfortable with.

My reading last year was heavily skewed to women writers, and since they do seem more prone to writing fiction with the themes and topics that most appeal to me, I was neither surprised nor bothered by that. Having said that, I’m trying to shift the balance a little this year, and finding men whose writing comes from a similar place seems like a good way to start. This is Where I Leave You is the first of Jonathan Tropper’s novels I’ve had the pleasure of reading, but I’m quite certain that it won’t be the last. show less

I have a new favorite author to add to my list of must-reads–Jonathan Tropper. I had already listened to the audiobook “The Book of Joe“ and loved his wild sense of humor and perceptive observations. I wasn’t disappointed as I laughed my way through this one.

Shortly after he walks in on his wife in bed with his boss––in his own bed, as a matter of fact–Judd Foxman is called to sit shiva for his deceased father. Sitting shiva entails the entire family-–a sexy, psychiatrist mother, 3 brothers with a lifetime of issues, and a cynical, outspoken sister — sitting in the same house for seven days of mourning, on small chairs that put them at crotch level of the hordes of visiting sympathizers.

This is a family of grudges, show more secrets and emotional repression, and you can tell from Day 1 that it’s not going to be pretty. But Tropper’s irreverent comical sense and witty repartee make this troupe of highly dysfunctional family members a delight. You’ll be laughing and rooting for them the whole way through. show less

Completely outside my comfort zone. (Seemingly) endless references to sex and (seemingly) endless profanity. Nevertheless, a brilliant depiction of a young man in 2009. I want to wash out the narrator’s mouth and put him (and most of the other characters in the book) in timeout while simultaneously thanking the author for showing me this world. Though I really never want to go there again.So how do I rate this book? It's brilliant, I know. Just not the kind of brilliant that I like. Guy brilliant. Especially young-ish guy brilliant.

Judd Foxman is not having a good time lately. First, he caught his wife in bed with his boss. Then his father died. Now he's been told that Dad, despite not being much of a believer or particularly big on Jewish tradition, expressed a dying wish for his family to sit shiva for him, meaning Judd now has to spend seven full days with his family, which might be more than any of their sanities can survive intact.

The basics of the story here feel fairly familiar. You've got a wacky dysfunctional family, complete with such standbys an over-sexualized, over-sharing mother, a ne'er-do-well younger brother, and several men so emotionally repressed they'd rather communicate by fighting than by talking. You've got various liaisons and breakups and show more marital infidelities. And you've got a protagonist who spends a heck of lot of time feeling sorry for himself about the state of his love life. But it all works surprisingly well, mainly because Tropper's writing is terrific. He has a real knack for coming up with exactly the right phrasing to bring out the humor or absurdity or emotional reality in the situations he's writing about, and the result is sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant and insightful, and occasionally all of those things at once.

I can't help comparing it to Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which I read earlier this year. I know a lot of people found that one very funny and very relatable, but while I appreciated some aspects of it, it just didn't click for me very well. This one does for me all the things that I think High Fidelity was trying to do but didn't quite pull off.

This is the first novel by Tropper that I've read, but I'm thinking it probably shouldn't be the last. show less

I haven’t laughed out loud like this from a book in a long time – once even laughing until I was crying. Ordinarily this would be a good thing, except I read this on a packed plane from Tucson to Chicago a couple of weeks ago. My husband was in the middle seat, with nowhere to shrink from his embarrassment as I banged on the seat in paroxysms of hysteria, shoving the book at him and saying over and over, "Oh, read this page, just one more, you have to read this!"...

Here’s the bizarre thing about this book: it has a very similar plot to that of The Believers by Zoe Heller, which I absolutely hated. Tropper, unlike Heller, understands how to get you to love a very, very dysfunctional family.

This Is Where I Leave You begins with show more the death of the father, Mort Foxman, from metastatic stomach cancer. Their mother Hillary informs them that their atheist father’s last wish was that they “sit shiva” for him. This is a Jewish custom requiring that the family spend seven (“shiva”) days together in mourning before they get back to their regular lives. (The purpose is not only to honor the dead, but to cut off the mourning process, so that families do not spend too much time focusing on death instead of celebrating life.)

So the Foxman children, Judd (34) – the narrator, his older sister Wendy, older brother Paul, and younger brother Philip gather at their mom’s house for the shiva. Paul’s wife and Wendy’s husband and kids also come, along with Philip’s latest girlfriend. Judd’s wife, Jen, is not there because they have separated; he moved out of their house two months before after finding Jen in bed with his boss.

The book takes you through the seven day ritual. Over the seven days, the family, long scattered by school and marriage and jobs, gets to know each other all over again. While this may not seem like a setting for hilarity, it very often is.

There are so many funny things about this book, and so many comical passages that I ran out of stickies twice just marking the ones I wanted to quote. (So I guess I won’t be using all of the quotes!) But the problem is, if I conveyed all the funny bits to you, I would spoil it for you. I want to give you a flavor for the writing, however, so I’ll steer clear of the humor (not easy to do) and go for the bittersweet. In this passage, Judd is imagining having a conversation with his boss. He begins by talking about how he and Jen were wildly in love… at first. Then he continues:

"I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. … how he’ll feel himself growing self-conscious telling funny stories to their friends in front of her, because she’s heard all his funny stories before; how she won’t laugh at his jokes the way other people do; how she’ll start to spend more and more time on the phone with her girlfriends at night. How they will get into raging fights over the most trivial issues: the failure to replace a roll of toilet paper, a cereal bowl caked with oatmeal left to harden in the sink, proper management of the checkbook. How an unspoken point system will come into play, with each side keeping score according to their own complicated set of rules. I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him.”

Evaluation: I enjoyed this book immensely. And while I laughed quite often, it is a book about leaving – whether through death or separation or leaving the past behind or even physically leaving – getting in the car and just driving. So it has some sad moments as well. But really, not too many; it's more like a Seinfeld episode, in which pathos is just an excuse for another comedy routine. Highly recommended! show less