Everything Matters!

The protagonist of this novel is an extremely gifted and intelligent man born with the grim knowledge, handed down by some divine source, that the earth is doomed. When the man is thirty-six, a comet will collide with the planet, wiping out every living creature. Understandably, the guy goes through his life in a melancholy state that wavers between apathy and drug-abusing depression. And why not? After all, with the world and everybody on it facing certain and impending extinction, nothing matters.

Except, no! Everything matters! It's right there in the title, exclamation point and all. Because after "everything" comes nothing, so "everything" is the only thing that matters at all! I've royally botched the delivery on the book's intended uplifting takeaway, heinously underselling it I'm sure. Still, I've only spoiled that the title - so boldly proclaimed on the cover and everything - turns out to be the thematic conclusion to the book. And what a book!

Ron Currie is an economical story-telling wizard, developing life histories for the protagonist and his family members in a narrative that spans thirty-six years in just 300 pages. There are tragedies big and small throughout the story - abusive parents, teenage break-ups, drug abuse, brain injuries, significant handicaps, cancer, car accidents - and still there are all kinds of redemption and salvation arcs.

Now, I know a lot of you must be sick of hearing this name on this blog, but comparisons are inevitable, so just roll with it; with his grand scopes told in simple sentences, and by injecting humor and small happiness into a tragedy-filled story that the reader knows will end in armageddon, Ron Currie absolutely evokes a strong sense of - yes - Kurt Vonnegut. But where Vonnegut's stories were scattered and often temporally sloppy, Currie's moves with a strong sense of continuity and structure. I'm not ready to dump too much high praise on Currie, but this book holds up as well as the best efforts from Vonnegut, who many of you know has become my favorite novelist over the course of this blog's history. David Foster Wallace is another name that I've seen mentioned a few times in descriptions of Currie's work, and although I've read very little of his stuff personally, I know a few blog members are big fans of that man, too.

A few days ago I finished Michael Crichton's The Lost World, and to draw a simple comparison, that book went really quickly but accomplished very little, plot-wise, in 400 pages. A few crazy scientists and businessmen honed in on, and then visited, an island full of dinosaurs, where several of them were very predictably eaten and the rest made it out on a boat. In Everything Matters!, Currie packed multiple life narratives into 300 pages that went by even quicker, but will stay with me for so much longer.

Give this one a shot. Currie has two other books that I'll be sure to check out soon enough, but in the mean time I can at least vouch for this book and vouch for it hard.