Everything Matters! by Jr., Ron Currie Ron

The Barnes & Noble Review

Ron Currie, Jr. has published two books of fiction: The first, God Is Dead, began with the premise that God, having visited earth as an African woman, had been eaten by a pack of wild dogs, leaving the rest of humanity to figure out life without a reigning deity. The second, Everything Matters!, presumes that a young man born, like Currie, in the '70s, is the "fourth smartest person in the history of the world" (Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha may -- or may not -- fit in there somewhere) and the sole human who knows that the earth will be destroyed by a comet on June 15, 2010, thus leaving him with the awesome responsibility of saving -- or not saving -- the inhabitants his home planet by his 36th birthday. Currie has not yet turned 33 (the "Christ year," according to some of those who, like the author, were raised Catholic.) You might call him an ambitious novelist. That might be an understatement.

Fittingly enough for a novel that will attempt to explain human life, we start off the first page in the womb. "Enjoy this time!" exhort the unnamed omniscient narrators who speak to us and our hero in the first person plural (much to the discomfort of his high school girlfriend, who will briefly suspect that her lover is not a messiah but rather a paranoid schizophrenic), and who seem to be in the position to offer a guidance and much later a few, rare bargaining chips to ensure that the world ends in a satisfactory manner. "You will need to flex your arms and legs, loll your head to strengthen the neck, crawl, stagger to your feet, then walk," they tell him. "Soon after, you must learn to run, share, swing a bat and hold a pencil, love, weep, read, tie your shoelaces, bathe and die."

It is, perhaps, ironic that the person entrusted with the fate of the earth, once he emerges from the womb into a working-class household in rural Maine, is known by the patriarchal diminutive, Junior, though this certainly fits nicely with the father-son theme in certain world religions (Currie, it might be pointed out, is also a Junior, a Ron to his character's John; his own father died a year before publication). And what a patriarch! Junior's father embodies an archetypal American masculinity: a man so silent he is "nearly mute" (the voices advise: "Know this and accept it, so that you don't waste energy, in later years, trying in vain to elicit words like 'love' and 'proud' from him") with a ferocious devotion to family and duty that comes out of what he sacrifices (booze, a baseball career thwarted by service in Vietnam) and what he defends (his aforementioned country and his wife and sons). This is the kind of guy who, when forced to borrow five dollars from a bus driver to buy his son a sandwich, actually mails the five dollars back with interest. His drive to be useful is so strong that he even asks for extra shifts at the bakery and warehouse after he wins the lottery (the latter luck attributed to another bizarre wrinkle in his son's story).

Like many gifted children, Junior feels set apart from his peers, though in his case, he knows his "gift," such as it is, makes him literally a spectacularly singular person. At school, "the other kids think he is a Jedi knight or something" while the teachers resent him, rightly recognizing that he is "eight times as smart, exponentially, than the smartest among them." When his moodiness provokes the attention of the administration, he thinks to himself: "You have no idea, sirs. I am not your routinely disturbed adolescent, pissed off about some generic bullying or lack of attention from my daddy. I see visions that make Hiroshima look like a cherry bomb. Visions you would find terrifying, even if you did not know, as I do, that they were true." The one person who does offer a kind of solace is his equally geeky girlfriend, Amy, who, in archetypal fashion, will be the only woman he loves or even considers loving throughout his life, though he often bums her out -- what to do when one's boyfriend is the kind of guy who "sits around brooding about road kill"?

Leaving him is one option, and Amy chooses a normal life at Stanford University while the traumatized Junior decides to drink away his early young adulthood at the local bars in their hometown. But his is no ordinary misery; soon enough, mysterious men show up to remind him of his mission, should he choose to accept it, and he goes underground.

Once we leave Maine, the novel careens into action, with stop-offs at government bunkers, clandestine meetings at the Econo-Lodge, and a university lab where Junior just might find a cure for cancer. Reading some scenes -- including a hilarious mishap involving tampering with an airline smoke detector that accelerates into an encounter with a duplicitous government agent, a grisly torture scene, and a just-in-the-knick of time rescue by our romantic hero -- one feels as if one is reading a treatment for some future summer blockbuster.

This is not a sly way to say that it is a poorly written novel. It is, in fact, a masterfully executed work of fiction, with a kind of thrumming prose that lifts off on every page. But it also has a fast-paced, allusive ease that marks a writer synthesizing elements from every corner -- world religion, pop culture, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, '80s big-budget action movies, romantic comedies. One might say it is not merely literature. Call it extra-literary.

When we reach the point that the end of the story seems certain, the narrative folds back on itself and offers us other possible versions (one can't help but wonder if this neat trick found its inspiration in the Choose Your Own Adventure Books familiar to those who were children in the '80s). Unlike, say, those condemned to a hundred years of solitude in the work of Gabriel García Márquez, will Currie's characters have a second opportunity on earth?

I won't spoil it, save to say that the final page has the quality of beautiful inevitability. In telling the story of a boy who tries to save the world, Currie comes back to the primal domestic drama that concerns each one of us: How do we live with the certainty that we will lose, in one way or another, those who matter to us most -- who may as well be the world? --Amy Benfer

Amy Benfer has worked as an editor and staff writer at Salon, Legal Affairs, and Paper magazine. Her reviews and features on books have appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Believer, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review.

From the Publisher

In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, Junior's loved ones emerge with parallel stories-his anxious mother; his brother, a cocaine addict turned pro-baseball phenomenon; his exalted father, whose own mortality summons Junior's best and worst instincts; and Amy, the love of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that could save humanity. While our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from a doomed planet, Junior's final triumph confounds all expectation, building to an astonishing and deeply moving resolution. Ron Currie, Jr., gets to the heart of character, and the voices who narrate this uniquely American tour de force leave an indelible, exhilarating impression.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer…His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own…Everything Matters! radiates writerly confidence. The excitement that drives the reader from page to page is not about the characters. It's about seeing what Mr. Currie will try next.

Publishers Weekly

In Curie's curious second novel (after NYPL Young Lion Award-winning God Is Dead), a young man nearly succeeds in his attempt to inject meaning into a doomed world. A mysterious voice has accompanied Junior Thibodeax all his life, having chosen the moment after Junior's birth to tell him that a meteor will destroy Earth in 36 years. The voice also tells him secrets about his father, his girlfriend and his brother, as well as providing a cure for cancer and sage advice against bombing a federal building. From modest beginnings, Junior descends into violent insanity before finding himself lifted to a position of supreme importance. But even with his foreknowledge, the prophet cannot win every battle, and the ones he loses are more than sufficient to break his heart. Curie shows an appreciation for whimsical storytelling, leaning on unlikely chains of events and multiple perspectives to tell what could otherwise be a very dark tale, and though the omnisciently narrated portions come off as heavy-handed, the big decision he makes toward the end recasts the story in a strangely hopeful light and lends a pile of emotional currency to the book's title. (July)

Edward B. St. John - Library Journal

Currie's first book, God Is Dead, was a collection of linked short stories in which God returns to Earth as a poor Sudanese woman and is devoured by wild dogs. Everything Matters! is a novel, but thematically and stylistically it is quite similar to the earlier work. Junior Thibodeau of Waterville, ME—the fourth-smartest person in human history—is born with the certain knowledge that an asteroid will destroy Earth in 36 years. In that case, what is the point of living? In this radical reimagining of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Junior tells his own story, while in alternating chapters his wildly dysfunctional family and friends provide commentary. VERDICT The basic premise is preposterous, and the subsequent events are incredible, but it is all presented in a matter-of-fact tone. This book is difficult to categorize. It's a comedy, but it's not particularly funny. It's a novel of ideas, but it mocks intellectualism. It's a fantasy, but it includes a cameo appearance by Sen. Olympia Snowe. This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but fans of God Is Dead will love it. [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/15/09.]—Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Kirkus Reviews

The apocalypse, provocatively envisioned with wild invention and irreverent wit. The declarative title and confrontational theology link Currie's second novel quite logically with its predecessor (God Is Dead, 2007). John Thibodeau Jr., aka "Junior," grows up oppressed by the message received from a mysterious otherworldly voice during his infancy that in 36 years, on June 15, 2010, a comet will destroy all life on earth. As Junior warily prepares to undertake an undisclosed "task," the story's viewpoint shifts among our protagonist (who addresses himself in a frequently clumsy second-person voice); his stoical, sentient dad; frail alcoholic mother; older brother Rodney, who's both a juvenile delinquent and a baseball phenom; and Junior's schoolmate Amy, who spends years worrying whether he'll ever become the man she can love. The peregrinations and problems of these necessarily connected characters are smartly juxtaposed with evidence in the world around them (e.g., the Challenger explosion) that suggests Junior isn't delusional. In some passages, Currie seems to be straining to fill pages: a terrorist plot against a Miami federal building engineered by a drug-dealing triple amputee; a sequence detailing Amy's foolhardy behavior aboard an airplane and her subsequent victimization by paranoid security personnel. But everything keeps circling back to Junior's unique ordeal and mission, and Currie pulls off a beautiful twist that reconfigures the narrative's momentum (arranged in a precise countdown), presenting an ironic and quite moving alternative version of the looming near future. In this brave old world, Rodney's Chicago Cubs make it to the World Series-and you'll never guess who hasbeen elected president of the United States. This vivid novel races and sputters jerkily, but it's an exhilarating ride nevertheless.

What People Are Saying

Jim Shepard
"Everything Matters! is staggeringly ambitious: it renders with both wit and sorrowful insight just how resourceful and patient disaster can be. It serves up the devastating and redeeming news of our helplessness in the face of love. It's both implacable in its design and generous in its willingness to grant its protagonists the second chances the rest of us are denied in life. And in doing all of that, it reminds us that when it comes to certain categories, nothing is irreparable, and nothing unforgivable."--(Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway and Love and Hydrogen)

David Benioff
"The Apocalypse is old news, but no one since St. John the Divine has written with such power and verve about the End of the World-- and Currie's book is far more full of love and compassion than John could muster. If you're going to write about Doom you'd better be funny and if you're going to write about Global Doom you'd better be damn funny. Currie accomplishes one of the rarest feats in literature-- he makes you dread turning each page at the same time you can't help turning each page. He leads you toward The End with wisdom and honesty, pointing out the beautiful sights along the way but never shielding your eyes from the fires ahead."--(David Benioff, author of City of Thieves and The 25th Hour)

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