HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER
Jonathan Tropper
Delacorte Press
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0385338902
ISBN-13: 9780385338905

• About the Book
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview -- July 20, 2007

Upon reading the flap copy for Jonathan Tropper’s latest novel, I prepared myself for a slightly depressing but mostly hilarious read --- a book that would make me think (a little) and laugh (a lot) but ultimately would have little effect on my consciousness. Boy was I wrong. HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER is instead the type of read that makes you feel like you’re getting punched in the gut over and over again, and while there is certainly an intense amount of pain, the truth is that it eventually feels worth it.

Although you would never guess it from the deceptively handsome, hip and pulled-together leading man on the cover, HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER’s protagonist is as disheveled and downtrodden as they come. After his gorgeous and supposedly out-of-his-league wife, Hailey, dies in a plane crash, 29-year-old Doug Parker spends the next year drinking copious amounts of Jack Daniels, moping around the house in his grubby underwear, and generally pretending that he doesn’t exist. He is pathetic. He is painfully vulnerable. And he is undeniably annoying to the rest of the world who, although they “understand his need to grieve,” feel that it’s time for him to buck up and get his life back in order --- especially in time for his younger sister Debbie’s wedding.

The problem, of course, is that Doug isn’t quite ready to move on. All of Hailey’s belongings are still strewn about the house --- the red bra that she hung on the doorknob the night before she died; the racy paperback she was reading, still on the night table. On top of the physical reminders, a day doesn’t go by without some sort of song, smell or taste triggering a memory of their life together. It’s as if life before Hailey didn’t exist. And life after her is just as hard for him to imagine --- until his family steps in.

Luckily for Doug (and HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER’s guiltily enraptured audience), the Parkers are a wholly dysfunctional yet completely outrageous and lovable bunch. His pill-popping mother is a bonafide kook but oddly wise at the most inopportune moments. His twin sister Claire, who is in the throws of leaving her boring husband, is a pregnant, raging lunatic with an attitude and a potty mouth, but the one who finally kickstarts Doug’s program for recovery. Perhaps the most interesting character is Doug’s father, who suffers from bouts of dementia. “There are days when he’s lucid and days when he’s lost, but even on the good days, he’s never quite sure about the details. He’s a man constantly in search of context,” but a man who adores his family unconditionally, nonetheless. Throw them all together in a room and you’re guaranteed a round of laughs --- a welcome respite from the otherwise relentless misery.

As the days draw closer, Debbie’s wedding to Mike (whom she met at Doug and Hailey’s house while Doug was sitting shiva) provides the ideal backdrop (and inter-character tension) for Doug’s road to recovery. On the one hand, his family is busy thinking about things like dinner napkins and who might give Debbie away (the loony-toons father? The embittered, widowed brother?), and on the other, Doug is busy mucking up the back-on-the-dating-scene process by sleeping with his rich neighbor’s buxom wife. Throw in the not-so-minor detail of where Russ, Hailey’s pot-smoking 15-year-old son from a previous marriage, will live, and you have the perfect recipe for unmitigated disaster.

And this is precisely why HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER is so hilarious, unabashedly heartbreaking --- and so true-to-life. It’s so rare that a writer can seamlessly convey the fragile (and very real) balance between comedy, tragedy and the bittersweet without completely overdoing the melodrama or making it kitschy, but Tropper manages to do it successfully without even seeming to try. Doug’s soliloquies on all the various stages of grief are downright breathtaking --- not to mention incredibly moving --- and it’s a wonder that the author isn’t a widow himself to have been able to describe such a bewildering process with such apparent ease.

Tropper’s newest novel is ultimately uplifting, but not unrealistically so. And while the undefined ending leaves more than a few questions unanswered, it only reinforces the idea that grieving --- and living --- is an unpredictable process and you never know what might arise around the corner. Without a doubt, HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER is sometimes funny, often poignant (in a dark sort of way) and relentlessly depressing. But is it a worthwhile journey to embark upon? You bet.

   --- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.

© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.

Back to top.