Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie, Jr.

    Currie - well, ok, Currie's agent and publisher - have been quietly spreading suggestions that he is the newest great American satirist, lampooning the failures and flaws of our culture left and right, quite possibly the true heir to Vonnegut.  Currie's a great writer with a tremendous way with words, but beyond that, the comparison isn't particularly apt.  I'd hesitate to say that he's particularly satirizing anything within Everything Matters - there's too much genuine love for our whole messy, flawed, careless, wonderful species.  If Currie's anything, he's a humanist; most of the characters, including the protagonist, are deeply flawed creatures, but it's their redemption, not their failures, that Currie's interested in.

    The plot, such that it is, concerns Junior Thibodeaux's life.  Born in middle class America with an older brother and loving but sometimes distant parents, there's only one big difference between Junior and everyone else: he's been aware, from the moment he was born, that the earth was going to be destroyed when he's thirty six years old.  It looms over his young mind, a spectre that influences every decision he makes, colors all his experiences.  It's the way that Currie frames those decisions, and the madcap dash through Junior's life, that makes up the first two thirds of the novel, stopping only occassionally for a few breathtaking detours detailing family bonds and the capricious nature of life and death, even to a young man who thinks he knows how it's all going to end.  As to the last third of Everything Matters - well, let me just say that I won't spoil it for you, and leave it at that.

    Of course, a good premise is only a good premise.  It's Currie's writing that really makes the book work.  Some of the narrative trickery he engages in is a tightrope act of genius precision - most notably the narrator that pops up, every few chapters, to comment wryly on Junior's progress through life from the confines of his head.  This unseen, unnamed narrator opens the book in its first chapter, with Junior still ensconced in the womb - the very first line functioning as a perfect example of the dry, empathetic nature of the character.  'First, enjoy this time!  Never again will you bear so little responsibility for your own survival.'  The narrator attempts to guide Junior, fails drastically more often than not, but still returns, over and over and over again throughout the novel, just to check in to see if he's learned his lesson yet.  What that lesson is, what it might mean, circles right back around to the purpose of the work, as it is this same narrator that has encoded in Junior his knowledge of the world's impending doom.

As the title bounces back and forth between Junior, his unseen narrator, and collections of other characters - most notably Junior's older brother, a petty bully turned gentle, slightly-brain-damaged pro baseball star - Currie manages to weave a tapestry of great sympathy for every character he approaches.  Again, there's that humanist standpoint, and it's hard to argue with, giving the title of the novel it's heft.  There's a trick to making characters likable, especially when we've witnessed them doing some fairly despicable things.  This debut manages it with aplomb.  At the end of the day, the only thing unengaging about Currie's debut novel is it's dull-as-dishwater cover.     

-Drew