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"The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister - has been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public." "Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same house. Like a family." "As the week quickly spins out of control, long-standing grudges resurface, secrets are revealed, and old passions reawakened. For Judd, it's a week long attempt to make sense of the mess his life has become while trying in vain not to get sucked into the regressive battles of his madly dysfunctional family. All of which would be hard enough without the bomb Jen dropped the day Judd's father died: She's pregnant." This Is Where I Leave You is Jonathan Tropper's most accomplished work to date, a riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind - whether we like it or not.
Tropper returns with a snappy and heartfelt family drama/belated coming-of-age story. Judd Foxman's wife, Jen, has left him for his boss, a Howard Stern-like radio personality, but it is the death of his father and the week of sitting shivah with his enjoyably dysfunctional family that motivates him. Jen's announcement of her pregnancy-doubly tragic because of a previous miscarriage-is followed by the dramas of Judd's siblings: his sister, Wendy, is stuck in an emotionless marriage; brother Paul-always Judd's defender-and his wife struggle with infertility; and the charming youngest, Phillip, attempts a grown-up relationship that only highlights his rakishness. Presided over by their mother, a celebrated parenting expert despite her children's difficulties, the mourning period brings each of the family members to unexpected epiphanies about their own lives and each other. The family's interactions are sharp, raw and often laugh-out-loud funny, and Judd's narration is unflinching, occasionally lewd and very keen. Tropper strikes an excellent balance between the family history and its present-day fallout, proving his ability to create touchingly human characters and a deliciously page-turning story. (Aug.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
According to Genesis, the earth was created in six days. In the newest work from Tropper (How To Talk to a Widower), the Foxman family spend a week together and the world practically implodes. Recently separated Judd, his two brothers, his sister, and their mother sit shiva for Foxman patriarch Mort. This seven-day Jewish ritual allows family members to mourn together while friends and relatives come to pay their respects—and have a little nosh. But the Foxman siblings don't get along, despite the best efforts of their celebrity child-care expert mother. As narrator Judd says, "Some families…become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure." VERDICT With its frat-house language and sexual obsessions, this hilarious, testosterone-driven thrill-ride comes with all the weaponry at the Foxmans' disposal: physical blows, verbal darts, psychological barbs, friendly jousts, and loving punches to the solar plexus. And the women have their say as well; there are no neutral corners in this melee. Highly recommended for Tropper fans, who will rejoice at the opportunity to indulge; others will wonder where he's been all their lives.—Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal
Jonathan Tropper is the author of How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B. He lives with his family in Westchester, New York, where he teaches writing at Manhattanville College. He is currently adapting This Is Where I Leave You as a feature film for Warner Brothers Studios.
Chapter 1
Dad’s dead,” Wendy says off handedly, like it’s happened before, like it happens every day. It can be grating, this act of hers, to be utterly unfazed at all times, even in the face of tragedy. “He died two hours ago.”
“How’s Mom doing?”
“She’s Mom, you know? She wanted to know how much to tip the coroner.”
I have to smile, even as I chafe, as always, at our family’s patented inability to express emotion during watershed events. There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion. We banter, quip, and insult our way through birthdays, holidays, weddings, illnesses. 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.
“It gets better,” Wendy says.
“Better? Jesus, Wendy, do you hear yourself?”
“Okay, that came out wrong.”
“You think?”
“He asked us to sit shiva.”
“Who did?”
“Who are we talking about? Dad! Dad wanted us to sit shiva.”
“Dad’s dead.”
Wendy sighs, like it’s positively exhausting having to navigate the dense forest of my obtuseness. “Yes, apparently, that’s the optimal time to do it.”
“But Dad’s an atheist.”
“Dad was an atheist.”
“You’re telling me he found God before he died?”
“No, I’m telling you he’s dead and you should conjugate your tenses accordingly.”
If we sound like a couple of callous assholes, it’s because that’s how we were raised. But in fairness, we’d been mourning for a while already, on and off since he was first diagnosed a year and a half earlier. He’d been having stomachaches, swatting away my mother’s pleas that he see a doctor, choosing instead to increase the regimen of the same antacids he’d been taking for years. He popped them like Life Savers, dropping small squibs of foil wrapping wherever he went, so that the carpets glittered like wet pavement. Then his stool turned red.
“Your father’s not feeling well,” my mother understated over the phone.
“My shit’s bleeding,” he groused from somewhere behind her. In the fifteen years since I’d moved out of the house, Dad never came to the phone. It was always Mom, with Dad in the background, contributing the odd comment when it suited him. That’s how it was in person too. Mom always took center stage. Marrying her was like joining the chorus.
On the CAT scan, tumors bloomed like flowers against the charcoal desert of his duodenal lining. Into the lore of Dad’s legendary stoicism would be added the fact that he spent a year treating metastatic stomach cancer with Tums. There were the predictable surgeries, the radiation, and then the Hail Mary rounds of chemo meant to shrink the tumors but that instead shrank him, his once broad shoulders reduced to skeletal knobs that disappeared beneath the surface of his slack skin.
Then came the withering of muscle and sinew and the sad, crumbling descent into extreme pain management, culminating with him slipping into a coma, the one we knew he’d never come out of. And why should he? Why wake up to the painful, execrable mess of end-stage stomach cancer? It took four months for him to die, three more than the oncologists had predicted. “Your dad’s a fighter,” they would say when we visited, which was a crock, because he’d already been soundly beaten. If he was at all aware, he had to be pissed at how long it was taking him to do something as simple as die. Dad didn’t believe in God, but he was a life- long member of the Church of Shit or Get Off the Can.
So his actual death itself was less an event than a final sad detail.
“The funeral is tomorrow morning,” Wendy says. “I’m flying in with the kids tonight. Barry’s at a meeting in San Francisco. He’ll catch the red-eye.”
Wendy’s husband, Barry, is a portfolio manager for a large hedge fund. As far as I can tell, he gets paid to fly around the world on private jets and lose golf games to other richer men who might need his fund’s money. A few years ago, they transferred him to the L.A. office, which makes no sense, since he travels constantly, and Wendy would no doubt prefer to live back on the East Coast, where her cankles and post- pregnancy jiggle are less of a liability. On the other hand, she’s being very well compensated for the inconvenience.
“You’re bringing the kids?”
“Believe me, I’d rather not. But seven days is just too long to leave them alone with the nanny.”
The kids are Ryan and Cole, six and three, towheaded, cherub-cheeked boys who never met a room they couldn’t trash in two minutes flat, and Serena, Wendy’s seven-month-old baby girl.
“Seven days?”
“That’s how long it takes to sit shiva.”
“We’re not really going to do this, are we?”
“It was his dying wish,” Wendy says, and in that single instant I think maybe I can hear the raw grief in the back of her throat.
“Paul’s going along with this?”
“Paul’s the one who told me about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said Dad wants us to sit shiva.”
Paul is my older brother by sixteen months. Mom insisted I hadn’t been a mistake, that she’d fully intended to get pregnant again just seven months after giving birth to Paul. But I never really bought it, especially after my father, buzzed on peach schnapps at Friday-night dinner, had acknowledged somberly that back then they believed you couldn’t get pregnant when you were breast-feeding. As for Paul and me, we get along fine as long as we don’t spend any time together.
“Has anyone spoken to Phillip?” I say.
“I’ve left messages at all his last known numbers. On the off chance he plays them, and he’s not in jail, or stoned, or dead in a ditch, there’s every reason to believe that there’s a small possibility he’ll show up.”
Phillip is our youngest brother, born nine years after me. It’s hard to understand my parents’ procreational logic. Wendy, Paul, and me, all within four years, and then Phillip, almost a decade later, slapped on like an awkward coda. 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. As the baby, he was alternately coddled and ignored, which may have been a significant factor in his becoming such a terminally screwed-up adult. He is currently living in Manhattan, where you’d have to wake up pretty early in the morning to find a drug he hasn’t done or a model he hasn’t fucked. He will drop off the radar for months at a time and then show up unannounced at your house for dinner, where he might or might not casually mention that he’s been in jail, or Tibet, or has just broken up with a quasi-famous actress. I haven’t seen him in over a year.
“I hope he makes it,” I say. “He’ll be devastated if he doesn’t.”
“And speaking of screwed-up little brothers, how’s your own Greek tragedy coming along?”
Wendy can be funny, almost charming in her pointed tactlessness, but if there is a line between crass and cruel, she’s never noticed it. Usually I can stomach her, but the last few months have left me ragged and raw, and my defenses have been depleted.
“I have to go now,” I say, trying my best to sound like a guy not in the midst of an ongoing meltdown.
“Jesus, Judd. I was just expressing concern.”
“I’m sure you thought so.”
“Oh, don’t get all passive-aggressive. I get enough of that from Barry.”
“I’ll see you at the house.”
“Fine, be that way,” she says, disgusted. “Good-bye.”
I wait her out.
“Are you still there?” she finally says.
“No.” I hang up and imagine her slamming her phone down while the expletives fly in a machine-gun spray from her lips.
Jonathan Tropper is known for his hilarious and clever novels, and he does not disappoint with his latest creation, This Is Where I Leave You.
Judd Foxman's life is a mess. He comes home early from work to find his beautiful wife, Jen, in bed with another man. And not just any man, but his boss. After moving out of his charming suburban home and into a shoddy basement apartment, he is informed of his father's death. Suprisingly, although he was never a religious man, his dad's dying wish was for his family to sit Shiva for one week, in his honor. Reluctantly, Judd heads to his mother's house.
Judd's family is a comedy lover's dream. Dysfunctional doesn't even begin to describe this clan. His mother is a world renowned parenting expert who can't even begin to understand her own children. His youngest brother, Philip, is a playboy who is constantly finding himself in one crisis or another. He comes to the family home with a guest that no one can quite figure out. Paul, his older brother, harbors a lot of resentment towards Judd. He and his wife are also struggling with fertility issues. His sister, Wendy, is his rock. But she is stuck is a loveless marriage and dealing with her own romantic disasters. Now all these siblings are forced to stay under the same roof. Add to this list a number of oddball mourners who come to pay their respects and you've got a week of dysfunctional comic drama. The repercussions are laugh out loud funny and poignant at the same time.
As I read this book, I couldn't help but think that it would make an amazing movie. The characters are just so oddly lovable and relatable. The family dynamic is incredibly familiar and easy to identify with. The Foxman's are everyone's family. Sure, they are somewhat eccentric and manipulative, but the love they have for each other is clear. Yes, they may despise each other at times, but underneath the chaos is an undying loyalty to each other. And isn't that pretty much how every family works?
18 out of 18 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I picked this book on a whim, merely for it's title and was an amazing result of judging a book by it's cover. Tropper's writing is so realistic, half way through I had to remind myself I wasn't reading a biography, but a work of fiction. He crafts his characters very well, and you have no choice but to sympathize and empathize with these people. They are very real. The book tugs at your heart and gives you hope, and is not fantastical in any sort of way. It caused me to then continue reading books by Tropper, and I have yet to be disappointed. This is great for realists and romantics and people plagued by their own thoughts.
11 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 1, 2011
This book is not what I expected it would be. First I may be too old to enjoy the abundance of foul language. The humor is over the top. I do not find it amusing but just a little sick.
10 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 14, 2011
This is a great read. I did not want to put it down. Jonathan had me laughing out loud throughout the book. He makes you feel as if you know everyone in the book. Must read....
6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This is the first book I have read by Jonathan Tropper, and I am now hooked. He pulls you in with his writing style, and I found myself drawn in by the first page. Great story, I definitely recommend it.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 24, 2010
this is one of the best written views on how men handle conflicts that happen in a relationship. some of the dialogue was tedious, but overall it was insightful from a man's point of view. i felt bad for him, and i was mad at his wife for her lack of respect to bring someone into their home (bed) but some people do this w/o thinking of the effect it has on the other person. only thing i didn't like was situation was left unresolved and i like books to complete the cycle.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 23, 2009
I thought this book was absolutely hilarious and, at times, heartbreaking. The dialogue was out of the park good.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 11, 2009
LOVED this book. I went out and bought another Tropper book the next week. This book was at times sad and poignant, but Tropper really does a wonderful job of bringing the humor out of dark scenarios. This is one book that will both make you laugh out loud and feel slightly guilty reading in public.
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 13, 2012
This is book is compulsively readable and entertaining. It is at once laugh out loud funny and heartbreaking. I read it in about three days. However, it is not lacking in substance or quality as some quick, easy reads are. The novel is ripe with genuine emotion, characters, and humor.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 19, 2009
This is one of my favorite books. The characters come alive in the pages with all their flaws and quirks. I couldn't put it down, and I thought the humor was spectacular. I have already given a couple of copies to my friends to enjoy.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 10, 2009
A lot of humor that everybody gets. A couple things that only fellows will laugh at (or laugh at differently).
Really liked his writing style! Often found myself saying "Hah! Cool! I like the way he said that. =)"
Was a little surprised by the ending - not in a disappointing way.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 10, 2009
I absolutely loved this book. Its definitely very adult-themed. So if you are offended by talk about sex, then its best to stay away. The writing is spot on and its probably one of the better, and funniest, books that I have read in a long time. Usually I'm a person who enjoys the thriller genre, but I delved into this book quickly and never looked back. And I don't think I've laughed so loud reading a book EVER!
Buy it, and enjoy it ... books like these come along once in a lifetime!
I never heard of Jonathan Tropper until this book, and I immediately went back to B&N and purchased his other novels. He really is a great, and funny writer.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Remember that time at your last family reunion when your Uncle Sal pinched your fiancee? In Tropper's world, it would have been your widowerer Father, and he would have wound up scoring with aforementioned fiancee in your childhood bedroom...from whence your shiftless younger brother runs his webcam porn business...thereby ensuring world-wide-web-broadcasting of the event. And that would have just been the first five minutes home. Hilarious and poignant by turns, Tropper navigates familial emotional minefields like nobody else today, keeping his larger-than-life wack-tastic characters shockingly real and vulnerable. Don't read this while drinking anything you'd mind snorting out your nose.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 7, 2012
I loved this book, the characters are damaged, sad, and hilarious. It's the dysfunctional family at it's best. I will read more of his books.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 7, 2012
One of the most entertaining books I have read in the last year.
A bit graphic for me, brutally honest character, but sooo funny.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 19, 2012
I laughed out loud, I cried, I loved this book! If you want to be thrown right into the middle of a family that is dysfunctional, funny, hurting and more real than fiction, then you should read this book!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 31, 2012
I originally bought this book because it was on sale and looked interesting. Little did I know that it would lead to sleepless nights and trips to the library and Barnes and Noble on a search for his other books. This story is a hilarious look at love, loss, and a crazy family--all from a guy's perspective. You will love his witty look at some very serious situations!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 14, 2012
Great writing. Funny, sad, heart-warming story. I liked the charachters.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 2, 2011
I was not sure if I would like this book with the graphic adultery scene. Very funny book. Kept you intersted. Reminded of a family communication disfunction. Very good read.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This book was an easy read. Laugh-out-loud funny! People around
me began to wonder if I was loosing my mind from my sudden outbursts.
Raw sometimes very graphic language but a touching and wonderful book.
I'm going to definitely read Troppers other books. If you like Marian Keyes you'll love Jonathan Tropper.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Overview
"The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister - has been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public." "Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same