![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |