One Last Thing Before I Go: A Novel

What I love about Jonathan Tropper's novels is that they are beautifully written, with straightforward plots (no gimmicks), a warm humour and most endearing characters. This one is no exception. Silver, a lonely but wealthy middle-aged musician, his glory days behind him, divorced from the wife he still loves, estranged from his only daughter (ditto), is whiling away his time in a hotel, where he spends his days lazing about by the pool with his two (also divorced) friends. The highlight of his week is the excursion he and a friend make to a clinic, to donate their sperm for a research project. Then two things happen. One is that he discovers that he has a life-threatening condition, and without surgery he will certainly die; but he's not at all sure that he wants the operation. Then his daughter Casey suddenly turns up, pregnant, and in a dilemma about what to do. So both of them have to make decisions (Casey would like her father to make hers for her), and Silver is not good at decisions. Meanwhile, his ex-wife Denise is about to re-marry, and Silver is understandably distressed about this. One way and another, Silver's life is in a pickle, and it is up to him to sort it out. As Silver dithers and prevaricates (sleeping with any attractive and willing female along the line), forming a closer relationship with Casey and trying to win back Denise, there are crises and several punch-ups, and he has to learn what he can and cannot have in life. And while I thought the ending of the novel wasn't entirely satisfactory (for me), I loved this book. Bring on the next one!

Pour tous les inconditionnels de Jonathan Tropper, ce livre est un must. Pour les autres aussi, Jonathan Tropper est un auteur à connaître. Quelle plume brillante.

Nein die Überschrift ist auf mich bezogen und nicht auf Silver , der Hauptfigur dieses Buches. Doch stellen wir mein Gefühlsleben zunächst einmal zurück und widmen uns dem Buch. Protagonist Silver ist Mitte 40 und geschieden ,seine Karriere als Musiker ist nach einem einzigen Hit vorbei bevor sie richtig begonnen hat und Silver verdient sein Geld damit in einer Hochzeitsband zu Spielen. Das seine Ex Frau kurz davor steht wieder zu Heiraten hilft da auch nicht gerade. Zu Eltern und Bruder hat er kaum Kontakt. Seine 18 Jahre alte Tochter sagt ihm zuerst das sie schwanger ist da er die Person ist bei der es Ihr am wenigsten ausmacht wenn sie ihn enttäuscht. Kurz gesagt sein Leben ist nicht so verlaufen wie er es geplant hatte und er ist unfähig es zu ändern. Erst nach dem er zusammenbricht und vom Arzt gesagt bekommt das nur ein Operation sein Leben retten kann versucht etwas anders zu machen. Sein 4 Punkte Plan lautet: ein besserer Mann werden ein besserer Vater werden sich zu verlieben sterben Geschrieben ist das Buch in typischer Jonathan Tropper Manier. Witzig, traurig, ironisch und mit viel Liebe aber trotzdem war ich am Ende unzufrieden. Warum? Das konnte ich mir zunächst selbst nicht erklären. Erst nach einiger Zeit wurde mir klar warum ich nicht glücklich war. Ich hatte die ganze Zeit das Gefühl alles schon einmal gelesen zu haben. Alle Bücher von Jonathan Tropper haben im Grunde die gleiche Seele. Die Story und die Personen darin mögen variieren aber es läuft immer auf das selbe hinaus. Person ist 30+ Jahre alt, mit seinem Leben unzufrieden, unfähig es zu ändern, einschneidendes Ereignis, Person bessert sich. Es gibt immer einen exzentrischen Charakter der für Unruhe sorgt. (hier seine Freunde Jack und Oliver, im letzten Buch Judd's Mutter die Sex-Therapeutin) und wie in den meisten seiner Bücher hat die Hauptperson auch wieder Beziehungen zu 2 Frauen (hier seine Ex und die Frau die Silver im Bücherladen beobachtet, in Sieben verdammt lange Tage waren es Jen und Penelope, in Enthüllt war es die Verlobte und die beste Freundin, in Stadtfeind Nr. 1 waren es Mrs. Habor und die Kindheitsfreundin,....) und am Ende steht eine geläuterte Person die in ein neues Leben aufbricht. Ich mag Jonathan Troppers Bücher sehr, besonders Stadtfeind Nr.1 aber ich werde das Gefühl nicht los das er ein und dieselbe Idee immer nur mit neuer Handlung ausstattet.

Another good read from Jonathan Tropper but I immediately found myself disappointed that it didn't have the first person narration like his other books. You can't help but warm to his main characters because they are just so damn honest! Their every emotion - and the resulting analysis - spills out allowing you to lose yourself into their world. And you will laugh, and cry; possibly even on the same page. In this book, the protagonist isn't just a man who's having a mid-life crisis; it's a man who's had one too many crises and looks unable to bounce back. This is something that really shakes the family tree and forces everyone to reveal their true feelings, which in turn complicates their interactions with each other. And therein lies the drama. I rate this a four star and all his other books a five, but Tropper remains, without a doubt, my favourite author.

Thank God for Jonathan Tropper. He's one of my favorite authors and you can reliably depend on him to put out an entertaining novel every couple of years. This one lives up to his lofty standards. It follows his usual storyline of someone in a crisis wisecracking their way through all of his troubles and managing to make a worse mess of things before they finally set their lives straight. Our protagonist here is Silver, a drummer for a now defunct one-hit-wonder band, who's getting by with work in a wedding band and living in a condo development where divorced men go after they've been banished by their wives. Silver discovers he has a life-threatening tear in his aorta, and while an operation could save him, he puts the operation off while considering whether his life is worth living. He lost the great love of his life, who's now planning to marry a great guy, and his Princeton-bound daughter, whom he neglected for years, has gotten herself pregnant. It's hard to believe that anyone not in a serious depression - and Silver clearly isn't - wouldn't immediately jump at a chance to save their lives, but if you play along with that premise, Tropper does a great job of tracking how Silver discovers whether life is worth continuing, even after he has disappointed everyone he cared about. Silver is a lout - and it can be a little hard to sympathize with him for what an absentee father he was during his daughter's formative years, particularly since his ex-wife wasn't the acrimonious type that made every interaction a bitter face-off. But as he often does, Tropper makes his irresponsible characters lovable by having them always disarm anyone who's angry with them. Anytime anyone here lets Silver know what an a-hole he is, his response is always, "I know and I agree." The dialogue, per usual, is fast and fun, even though it does strain credulity a little bit that every character here has a black belt in smart-alecky repartee. As one example, when Silver introduces himself to Lily, a folk singer he has a crush on, the exchange goes: Silver: "I'm not good at this." Lily: "What?" S: "At talking to you." L: "A lot of people aren't good at talking to me. You should meet my parents." S: "I don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment." Another standard element is the fight scene between two guys who aren't really good at fighting and who stumble their way through an awkward mashing of bodily parts - and here the confrontation between Silver and his ex-wife's new fiancé is played to full comic effect. There are also a lot of observations about the peculiar absurdities of human nature, and while these aren't the profound, unexpected insights you might get in a Robert Cohen novel because Tropper focuses on the more clichéd aspects of humanity - like middle-aged men's fascination with the beauty of college girls - it's amazing how much fresh insight he can provide on well-worn topics. He also may over rely on a trick - Silver often has interior dialogue that reveals in embarrassing detail his feelings for a particular person and the secrets they've shared with him - and then after we've been given it as interior thoughts, he discovers he's said it out loud and embarrassed himself and everyone who heard it. It's supposed to be a condition of his aortic tear, I don't know if such a condition exists where someone would be unaware that they're speaking, but it happens about five times or more in the novel. I recognize that these credulity-straining tricks are the stock-in-trade of comic novels. True to the comic genre, Tropper keeps things like even in the most intense moments. When Silver accompanies his daugther to the clinic because she is considering getting an abortion, they're both emotionally overwrought but they trade witty barbs in the waiting room -- not something most fathers and daughters would be capable of in that difficult of a situation. In the final analysis, Tropper's books are highly readable and entertaining because his exceptional talent is evident on every page. His descriptions are always dead on and inventive, like "The shop is run by Pearl, a buxom Hungarian widow in her fifties who applies her makeup with a paintbrush and whose every move is punctuated by the rustle of nylons rubbing together and the Christmas jingle of a thousand golden bangles" or "She is a drab sliver of a woman, with paper-thin lips and the harried expression of someone who has long since resigned herself to being the only competent person on the planet." When Silver's family decides to stage an intervention to convince him he should get the needed operation, his successful brother offers a moving portrait of how much he misses the camaraderie of their younger days and how he assumed they had recaptured that closeness in the years right after Silver's divorce when he would pay him regular visits - it's a moving sentimental passage that gets immediately turned on its head when Silver reveals he stopped coming because his brother's attempt to welcome him into the embrace of his intact family actually felt to him like a deliberate attempt to rub his nose in the fact that his brother had made a much happier life for himself. It's a brilliant 180 turn that only someone with Tropper's talents could pull off. As other reviewers have noted, the exchanges between Silver and his teenaged daugther, Casey, are hearfelt. There are a lot of sentimental moments -- and perhaps one that ODs on sentiment (a friend of Silver's at the home for discarded husbands reunites with his estranged son while he's undergoing chemotherapy), the other family exchanges are moving without going over the top. I particularly liked the passages in which Silver's father, a rabbi, takes him on his rounds of overseeing a bris, a bar mitzvah, a death and a wedding to help reignite Silver's passion for life. I always grab Tropper's novels as soon as they're available. I look forward to his next one, and it'll be interesting to see how his talents translate onto the small screen with the debut next year of the Cinemax show, Banshee, he's been working on with fellow author David Schickler.