Everything Matters! in What's the Name of That Book???

Oct 05, 2012 Cindy rated it it was amazing

Oh boy! Have tissues at the ready.

So, you can find the summary easily enough. A fetus, in utero, learns of the world's impending end, from some outside unknown source, and has to live his life with this knowledge. I don't want to reveal much more but, suffice it to say, it's unique in its premise and intriguing. I loved it.

The book is written in two formats-one in the omniscent third person-religious people may believe it's God or a god (I thought it was some alien life form)-and the other is th Oh boy! Have tissues at the ready.

So, you can find the summary easily enough. A fetus, in utero, learns of the world's impending end, from some outside unknown source, and has to live his life with this knowledge. I don't want to reveal much more but, suffice it to say, it's unique in its premise and intriguing. I loved it.

The book is written in two formats-one in the omniscent third person-religious people may believe it's God or a god (I thought it was some alien life form)-and the other is this first person narrative, alternating between various characters. All is told chronologically. I loved the style. It kept the novel moving and felt unique.

However, I won't lie. I did find some passages tedious, wishing to move on to find out what happened to other characters. And if you get the gist of the book-you'll realize that EVERYTHING MATTERS, every character, every passage, every choice. It's difficult to accept our mortality but, given that we can't change it, we have to accept and enjoy this one life. This book makes sure you get this reminder if you needed one. It was really emotional and difficult for me to read the cancer passages (my grandfather and uncle passed away from cancer) but it was life, the circle of it.

Anyway, my favorite lines:
"Pick a self. Any self."
"...with infinte choices comes the potential for infinite happiness."
"Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everythying is all you've got...and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don't ever ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative."
"And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that's fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned-to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control."
"...that there is no escape and never war, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they [people] understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives...Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time...anything, anything, anything is possible."

Thanks Universe and Ron Currie Jr. for the little reminder. :)

...more

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Jul 15, 2011 Laura rated it did not like it

Shelves: science-fiction, overrated, book-club, fiction

One and one-half stars; maybe one and three-quarters on a day when I'm feeling magnanimous (which I'm not today).

Few things make me want to cry (and not in a good way) quite so much as a book with a great theme, a decent premise, a pretty good narrative, and awful execution. By that measure, Everything Matters! almost drowned me as the tears filled the bedroom and started reaching my ankles. Ron Currie's thesis here -- over-simply stated, just live your life and stop trying to micromanage everyt One and one-half stars; maybe one and three-quarters on a day when I'm feeling magnanimous (which I'm not today).

Few things make me want to cry (and not in a good way) quite so much as a book with a great theme, a decent premise, a pretty good narrative, and awful execution. By that measure, Everything Matters! almost drowned me as the tears filled the bedroom and started reaching my ankles. Ron Currie's thesis here -- over-simply stated, just live your life and stop trying to micromanage everything because capital-L Life is ultimately meaningless, and the law of unintended consequences won't let you get away with it anyway -- is very fine, and in the hands of another author (say, David Mitchell) might have led to a great, or even near-brilliant work.

But Currie doesn't quite seem to know to do with either his theme, his characters, or himself. Everything in the book is so over-determined that my eyes also got stuck in the back of my head from rolling them so hard.

For starters is the really obvious one: the protagonist is named "Junior." Surely there was another way of conveying a fraught father-son relationship without having a protagonist (a supergenius, no less) a grown man who calls himself "Junior"? I mean, really -- is Currie honestly unaware what comes to mind when you present someone with an adult named Junior? Really? He couldn't have accomplished the same thing by naming his character, whose given name is John Thibodeaux, Jr., "Johnny" or "Jack"?

The inevitable conclusion is that Currie simply doesn't think his readers will get it unless they're pounded over the head, hard and repeatedly. It's not altogether clear whether that's because Currie doesn't trust the reader or doesn't trust himself, but whichever reason it is, it results in a book that makes you want to grind your teeth from almost the first page. This flaw afflicts the entire book, and the result is to patronize the reader. It's not enough that Junior (arrrrgh, I hate even typing that) (view spoiler). It's not enough that Junior's brother is a baseball player -- he has to be the greatest baseball player of his time. It's not enough that Junior is a prodigy -- he has to be the 12th (that's an approximation; I don't recall the exact ordinal number and there's no way I'm leafing through this mess of a book to find it) smartest person in the history of mankind and (view spoiler) And so forth.

Currie also spends a lot of time painting himself into narrative corners and then wriggling out of the mess he's created by use of a single plot device: Junior is not only a genius, but also omniscient. This plot device would be just fine, I guess, if it weren't for the fact that it comes and goes for no reason other than to advance the plot when Currie has written another check he can't cash. Thus, when it's convenient for Junior to know everything, Junior knows everything, but when it's convenient for Junior know nothing, Junior knows nothing. Nuh-uh. Can't do that. The world of the book can be fantastical, but it has to be consistent.

Making this giant mess worse is that while the book has a strong narrative, the writing itself, with a few short exceptions, just kind of plods along, never achieving anything remotely poetic, beautiful, or even especially interesting. The whole thing comes across as a novella written by a talented 15-year-old who hasn't quite found his voice yet.

This conclusion holds especially true in light of the fact that Currie includes a long aside about how the history of the world might be changed if one character hadn't stepped on a bumble bee. Truly. This passage might be all right in a certain context, particularly if this was a YA book (which I think it wasn't, but frankly, the tone and style made it awfully hard to tell). But the entire passage is presented in a breathless, gee-whiz-isn't-this-clever, I-bet-you-never-thought-of-it-this-way tone that left me unsure whether to burst out laughing or just throw the damn book across the room (ok, I was reading it on a Nook, so that would have been a bad idea, but you know what I'm saying). I mean, it's hard to know how to react, except to note that "A Sound of Thunder" was first published nearly 60 years ago, in 1952. Have things gotten so bad in publishing that the bumble bee passage didn't sound vaguely familiar to anyone reading the manuscript?

Mostly, this book left me annoyed about the waste, the waste, the waste. As I said, there's a strong narrative and good theme (which is the only thing that elevated it over one star for me), but came across as an unfinished work from a writer's workshop where the main goal was to be supportive rather than to actually help someone improve his writing. ...more

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Feb 03, 2010 Trin rated it it was ok

Shelves: american-lit, apocafic, fiction

I think this book really suffered from when I read it. It contains a lot of things that I am prone to like—unusual narrative techniques! angsty young geniuses! the apocalypse!—but also a lot of things that I hate, such as women getting fridged for the sole purpose of furthering the main dude's angst. SIGH. Hot on the heels of Horns and...I don't know, pretty much the whole of angsty dude literature ever, I have had enough of this particular cliché. I'm also sick of narratives that build to a BIG ...more

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May 29, 2010 Erin rated it really liked it

Really enjoyed this piece of....I'm not sure...slightly meta-fiction? It reminded me a bit of John Dies at the End in that it took one out-there premise, then placed it firmly in the real world. Loved and adored Amy, was enthralled by Part III and the countdown tool was interesting - in fact, just liked the whole thing, especially as a lighter take on the end-of-the-world genre. ...more

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