Fatherly Fondness Amidst Hollywood Kitsch

At around page 200 of the novel Everything Matters! I was thinking how I could pan it: "Ron's Currie's book reads like the fourth season of sitcom with all the wit and pathos used up, he resorts to secret agents, a cancer cure and drug culture references."

What moved the book from "pretty stinky" to "OK" was a vignette in its waning pages when the protagonist John Thibadeau Jr. gets a call from his mother that his elderly father is too weak to get up from the toilet. In the book's second-person voice (a key to its conceit), John Jr.'s encounter with his father is described.

You crouch in front of your father and look into his eyes and what you see there very nearly breaks you. "Dad," you say. "I'm going to pick you up, all right?" He drops his gaze and nods. You slide your hands under his arms and try gingerly to find the best purchase, though there is no gentle way to lift a grown man. Your mother's still on her haunches to the left side of the toilet, ready to pull your father's pants up once he's on his feet. She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand.

John Sr. was moved and so was I. Fatherhood is a theme of this blog and this little moment revealed a little something about it -- the loyalty, the messiness, the heartache and the love.

Outside of that little scene, the book reads something like a screenplay for a stereotypical Hollywood movie. There's a comet coming to destroy the earth. Only one man can save it: the protagonist who from birth is addressed in the second person by an omniscient voice. But, oh no, his foibles lead him into drug addiction and heartbreak; he's lost his way.... But wait, now he's reunited with his old girlfriend and sleeps with her -- there's hope! Then she dies. He's already found a cure for his father's cancer, only to have the father die days later, but the comet is still coming. Cue the special effects ... the multiverse is allowing our hero and his family and second chance!

The whole end-of-the-earth thing is supposed to add a philosophical dimension to the story. What is the purpose of life if it is all going to come to an end some day? John Jr.'s response mostly plays out as addiction and rehab, culminating with the profound conclusion that "Everything Matters!"

Well, OK, that's fine for a sitcom or summer flick, but I'm going to go back to being a dad.