“I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. He begins by talking about how he and Jen were wildly in love… at first. In this passage, Judd is imagining having a conversation with his boss. I want to give you a flavor for the writing, however, so I’ll steer clear of the humor (not easy to do) and go for the bittersweet. (So I guess I won’t be using all of the quotes!) But the problem is, if I conveyed all the funny bits to you, I would spoil it for you. There are so many funny things about this book, and so many comical passages that I ran out of stickies twice just marking the ones I wanted to quote. While this may not seem like a setting for hilarity, it very often is. Over the seven days, the family, long scattered by school and marriage and jobs, gets to know each other all over again.
The book takes you through the seven day ritual. Judd’s wife, Jen, is not there because they have separated he moved out of their house two months before after finding Jen in bed with his boss. Paul’s wife and Wendy’s husband and kids also come, along with Philip’s latest girlfriend. So the Foxman children, Judd (34) – the narrator, his older sister Wendy, older brother Paul, and younger brother Philip gather at their mom’s house for the shiva. (The purpose is not only to honor the dead, but to cut off the mourning process, so that families do not spend too much time focusing on death instead of celebrating life.) This is a Jewish custom requiring that the family spend seven (“shiva”) days together in mourning before they get back to their regular lives. Their mother Hillary informs them that their atheist father’s last wish was that they “sit shiva” for him. This Is Where I Leave You begins with the death of the father, Mort Foxman, from metastatic stomach cancer. Tropper, unlike Heller, understands how to get you to love a very, very dysfunctional family.
Here’s the bizarre thing about this book: it has a very similar plot to that of The Believers by Zoe Heller, which I absolutely hated. My husband was in the middle seat, with nowhere to shrink from his embarrassment as I banged on the seat in paroxysms of hysteria, shoving the book at him and saying over and over, “Oh, read this page, just one more, you have to read this!”… Ordinarily this would be a good thing, except I read this on a packed plane from Tucson to Chicago a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t laughed out loud like this from a book in a long time – once even laughing until I was crying.
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