** spoiler alert ** One Last Thing Before I Go is equal to Tropper's best. If you've read anything else by him, this will be familiar: the suburban setting, the early- to middle-aged male main character with marital problems and a complicated relationship with his child, the humor, the wisdom, the occasional absurdity. Though he revisits this framework in each novel, he pulls it off without seeming repetitive, much the same as Jhumpa Lahiri continues to write about first- and second-generation Indian immigrants in the U.S. (and that is the end of the Tropper-Lahiri comparison).

The author is not afraid to make his main character - Silver, in this case - pathetic or to show him humiliated, which can be a difficult thing to do; the reader naturally wants to empathize with the character, not hold him in contempt. Somehow, Tropper pulls this off as well, so we root for someone we might pity or disdain if we encountered him in person. Silver has the same effect on the people in his life as well; his daughter, his ex-wife, and her fiance all have valid reasons to hate him, but none do. On the occasions that his inner monologue becomes his outer monologue, one can see why.

Overall: if you've liked Tropper's writing in the past, you'll like One Last Thing Before I Go, and if you haven't read anything by him before, it is a great place to begin. A caution, though, to those who dislike ambiguous endings.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost. (p. 293 of ARC)