Everything Happens Today: A Novel

by Jesse Browner

Overview

“A stupendous, thought-provoking, devilishly delicious novel that reads like Zen koan meets Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . Highly recommended” (Library Journal, starred review).

Everything Happens Today records a single day in the life of Wes, a seventeen-year-old who attends Manhattan’s elite Dalton School and lives in Greenwich Village in a dilapidated town house with his terminally ill mother, distant father, and beloved younger sister. In the course of one day everything will happen to Wes: he will lose his virginity to the wrong girl and break his own heart, try to meet a Monday morning deadline for a paper on War and Peace, and prepare an elaborate supper he hopes will reunite his family. Wes struggles through the day deep in thoughts of sex, love, Beatles lyrics, friendship, God, and French cuisine—a typical teenager with an atypical mind, a memorable young man who comes to the poignant understanding of how fragile but attainable personal happiness can be.

“A deeply compassionate novel by a very fine writer.” —Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609450519
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/27/2011
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jesse Browner is the author of four books including the novels Conglomeros (Random House 1992), Turnaway (Random House 1996) and The Uncertain Hour (Bloomsbury 2007). He has also translated a number of notable books including the award winning Celine: A Biography. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two daughters.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Everything Happens Today

"A deeply compassionate novel by a very fine writer."
—Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland

"Browner (The Uncertain Hour) has crafted a stupendous, thought-provoking, devilishly delicious novel that reads like Zen koan meets Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with some modern "english" that sets the plate spinning. Highly recommended."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"A light, modern and keen look at the discord between whimsy and prudence."
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Jesse Browner's The Uncertain Hour 

"A sumptuous and affecting novel."
—Michael Lukas, San Francisco Chronicle

"If I say that Jesse Browner's The Uncertain Hour is a truly original work of art, I hope I won't scare anyone off. It's also the most engrossing page-turner I've picked up in a long while."
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 

"The Uncertain Hour is that very rare thing—an historical novel of love and ideas not only free of pedantry but also serious and entertaining...As one would expect from an award-winning translator of both Jean Cocteau and Rainer Maria Rilke, it's also elegantly written with a narrative so well-relaized that it's easy to overlook the 46-year-old author's formal audacity."
—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times 

"The Uncertain Hour is...elegant meditation on such matters as the nature of love, what makes a good life, and whether there can be such a thing as a perfect death. I don't know which to praise more: the author's feat of historical reconstruction, or his boundless powers of invention."
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind 

From the Publisher

"A deeply compassionate novel by a very fine writer."

Joseph O'Neill

An angst-filled day in the life of a young man whose hope for an idyllic relationship is intruded upon by life's rich realities.

The latest from Browner (The Uncertain Hour, 2007, etc.) is a rumination on young love and the promises therein. Browner's Caulfield-esque ruminator is Wes, a 17-year-old living in Greenwich Village with his dying mother and an emotionally departed father. What is sweet in Wes' family life is his ebullient relationship with his little sister Nora, who calls him "Daddy-O" and whom Wes obviously adores. Unfortunately it's a day of massive self-recrimination for Wes, who has come home on the Walk of Shame after losing his virginity to a lovely young thing named Lucy. This development has shattered Wes' fantasy of following up on his box of fantasies dubbed, "This thing with Delia." As Wes inoculates his guilt with old Elliot Smith lyrics, his friend James is one of the few to tell him the truth. "There is no thing with Delia," James says. "There never has been a thing with Delia. It's all in your head, like a piece of shrapnel." Though there is plenty of navel-gazing in Wes' restrained sense of panic and gloom, Browner does a fine job of mixing the incongruities of modern communication—readers may wince with every ping of the iPhone—with the timeless anxiety of young people finding their way. "I seem to be paralyzed by the challenge of doing the right thing," Wes confesses. "It's not like it's straightforward, the way you might think. There seems to be a trick to it, like a trick of the mind, or a trick or perspective, or something."

A light, modern and keen look at the discord between whimsy and prudence.

Kirkus Reviews