What is This Is Where I Leave You About and Why Should I Care?ĭo you get along with your family? C'mon, be honest. It's definitely the funniest novel we've read since Wes Seinfeld Apatow Jr.'s underrated masterpiece, A Book about Nothing. Tropper would much rather make you laugh than sob into your non-alcoholic drink. We even see the insecurity and self-doubt left in the wake of a broken marriage. We see how inter-family tension can grow like a cancer if repressed or ignored. We see how modern men, like Judd and his brother Phillip, get trapped in extended adolescence. The result is an often-hilarious look at family, love, and the trials of adulthood. Trust us, if you knew the Foxmans, you'd be cringing. On top of that, he has to spend a week at his childhood home with his family to sit shiva, which essentially the Jewish version of a wake or funeral visitation, only a lot longer. Let's go ahead and run down the list: his wife cheated on him with his boss (ouch), he lost his job (oof), and his dad just died (gah). The plot follows Judd Foxman, a man in his mid-thirties with a lot on his plate. Now imagine that they went on to have a whole family of genetically engineered wunderkinds, and you'd be pretty close to Tropper's fifth novel, 2009's This Is Where I Leave You. Imagine that Wes Anderson and Jerry Seinfeld had a novel-writing baby with Judd Apatow (fertility science has made a lot of progress) and you're halfway to Jonathan Tropper's 2000 debut novel, Plan B.
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