The Book of Joe
by Jonathan Tropper

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Book Reviews of The Book of Joe

Book Review: If we wouldn't look down, we'd make it to the other side."
Summary: 4 Stars

Joe returns to a town that is solidly immersed in recession, with for sale signs on the front lawns, and a sense of desperation in the "quotidian tidiness." And to many of the residents, Joe has done unknowable and irreparable damage to their town, and to their reputations. The local book club throws copies of his book onto his lawn, a customer at the local cafe hurls a milkshake over him, and his childhood sweetheart Carly - with who he is still in love - is angry and resentful at his thoughtlessness in writing the book. Joe faces an uphill battle to reconnect with his brother Brad, and Brad's wife Cindy, but he succeeds forming an adolescent bond with his nephew Jared, and his old friend Wayne, who has returned to Bush Falls from Los Angeles, and who is now suffering from AIDS. Joe has spent so much time re-living and rewriting those years that he can no longer discern "which vignettes are the result of which process." But through his daffy, intuitive literary agent Owen, Joe comes to terms with the fact that he has a compulsive need right past wrongs.

As the scattered fragments of Joes past "pop up like Starbucks franchises," he revisits the dreadful dealings of his senior year in nineteen eighty-six, where he discovers sex with Carly, and the fact that, Wayne and Sammy, his two best friends are gay. Joe loved to hang out with Wayne and Sammy, singing the lyrics to the music of Bruce Springsteen, smoking lots of dope, and salivating after Lucy Harber, Sammy's curvaceous and attractive mother. But Joe gradually finds himself becoming embroiled in the sexual politics of the town, as he tries desperately to keep Wayne and Sammy's affair a secret from the small-minded community. Seventeen years later, Joe wants to forgive Bush Falls and particularly his father, but somewhere he blinks and all those years has flown by in an "uneven forgiveness," which has "become septic, like an infection festering inside him." Joe has shed all those who cared about him "like a snakeskin."

Joe thinks he's exorcised the demons by writing the book, but on returning to Bush Falls, he realizes that he's only appeased them temporarily. And he wonders how unwittingly he's drifted from the boy he used to be and how little he has to show for it. The last seventeen years seem to have been reduced to this tiny area on the map of his life, "just a little yellow shade on the legend to mark my time away from the falls." Tropper's message is that holding onto anger, in whatever form, is a waste of time, in fact, it's a waste of life. Immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable, and with a nicely controlled narrative, The Book of Joe never falls into urban clich? or fake sentiment. Although some readers might find the ending a little predictable and contrived - there is the expected death, and also the expected romantic redemption for Joe, the story still remains one of the most entertaining the year. Immensely filmable and beautifully told, it comes as no surprise that the movie rights for this fine novel have been optioned. Mike Leonard May 04.

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