Thursday, September 17, 2009
Movies, TV shows and books about the end of the world are nothing new. American entertainment is obsessed with when and how Earth’s demise will occur. Will aliens destroy us? Is the year 2012 the year of the world’s sudden demise? And so on.
Such an influx of apocalyptic entertainment makes it difficult for an author to write about the end of the world in a way that is entertaining without being cliché or repetitive. But that is exactly what Ron Currie Jr. succeeds in doing with his most recent novel titled Everything Matters!.
Whether everything (or anything at all) actually matters is what the protagonist, Junior, strives to figure out throughout the entirety of the book. When Junior is still in utero, an unidentified, omniscient voice bestows knowledge about the end of the earth upon his unborn ears. Junior then grows up understanding that the world will end when he is 36 years and 168 days old, and because of this understanding, it is difficult for him to see any rhyme or reason in what he does. Why does anything matter when the end is just around the corner? Junior struggles to answer that question, and he has to come to terms with his burden of knowledge. He needs to decide who to share the secret with and how to spend his life, and he encounters devastating yet comical situations during his 36 years on Earth.
Everything Matters! is a book that is both unusual and existential, but not too much of either. Currie uses just the right amount of humor in an otherwise tragic story to make the novel an engaging and original read.
Three and a half stars.
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