You don’t have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can’t quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.
You don’t have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can’t quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.
With the wedding looming and both Silver and Casey in crisis, this broken family struggles to come together, only to risk damaging each other even more. One Last Thing Before I Go is Jonathan Tropper at his funny, insightful, heartbreaking best.
About Jonathan Tropper
Jonathan Tropper is the New York Times bestselling author of five previous novels; Plan B, The Book of Joe, Everything Changes, How To Talk to a Widower, and This Is Where I Leave You. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. He is also a screenwriter, and the co-creator and executive producer of the HBO/Cinemax television show Banshee, premiering in 2013.
Editorial Review
Silver has never been much of a dad or a husband, so when he finds out about his defective heart, he determines he will not have a life-saving operation. After all, what does he have to live for? He’s lived long enough to see the breakup of his band, The Bent Daisies, and his music career ended with their one-hit wonder, “Rest in Pieces.” Now he’s living his days with other losers at The Versailles, a run-down motel. To his credit, the awareness of his precarious health causes him to rethink his pathetic life, and he’s able to come up with a to-do list that includes “Be a better father. Be a better man. Fall in love. Die.” By the end of the novel he’s able to cross almost everything off. Knowing he’s going to die concentrates his mind, and even the surgeon—both coincidentally and ironically his ex-wife Denise’s fiancé—can’t persuade Silver to undergo the operation. Silver is able, albeit briefly, to reestablish intimacy with Denise, and Casey, Silver’s daughter, effects a temporary reconciliation that leads her to call her father “Dad” (which both perplexes and pleases him) instead of “Silver.” In other words, what Silver ultimately achieves is to move beyond the inscription he imagines on his tombstone: his name, the years of his birth and death, and a phrase, the acronym for which is “WTF?” – Kirkus Reviews
A Man’s Humdrum Life Suddenly Turns Potent
The New York Times Book Review – August 15, 2012 (Excerpt)
Jonathan Tropper’s slick, manipulative new novel is about a lovable sad sack named Drew Silver. “You’ve got that kind of cuddly bad-boy thing going on, like you’re dangerous, but only a little bit, you know?” his daughter tells him.
Silver, who is called only Silver, perhaps because no one respects him enough to use his full name, has gone through life lousing things up. “He has been an idiot for so long that sometimes he forgets what an idiot he is,” Mr. Tropper writes. Idiot or not, Silver seems to be sort-of loved by everyone who knows him. So it seems meanspirited to wish him dead.
But Mr. Tropper doesn’t give readers of “One Last Thing Before I Go” much choice. He contrives a life-threatening emergency that injects this otherwise weightless, jokey book with a big dose of pathos. Its whole plot hinges on whether Silver will live or die. Will his story really develop a serious side? Or will it tell the uplifting tale of how a hopeless loser finds love and learns to be a better man? [Read the full article...]
Ron Charles: Tropper’s ‘One Last Thing Before I Go’
The Washington Post Book Review – August 14, 2012 (Excerpt)
In 2010, during the coronation of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” a popular author of commercial women’s fiction named Jennifer Weiner sparked a firestorm in the fragile ecosystem of the literati. Perched safely atop her 11 million copies in print, she dared to complain about the unequal critical attention paid to novels by men and those by women. The ruckus started on Twitter, a uniquely bad place to articulate a complex argument, and Weiner’s point was quickly obscured by a clash of giant personalities and hashtags.
It’s distressing, of course, when a woman is right; when she’s witty, too, it’s intolerable. Fortunately, we can draw upon a reliable cache of special words to denigrate women’s speech, from “harping” to “bitching,” but until the waiters could shoo these harridans from the old boys club, we had to hear them nagging: When a man writes a novel about marriage and family, we call it “literature”; when a woman does it, we call it “women’s fiction.”
I kept thinking about this debate while reading Jonathan Tropper’s mildly amusing, ultimately annoying new novel,“One Last Thing Before I Go.” Offering a male alternative to “chick lit,” Tropper had something going in his previous novel, “This Is Where I Leave You,” one of the best comedies of 2009. But his new novel has neither the sperm count for “lad lit” nor the endearing charm of Nick Hornby. Instead, “One Last Thing Before I Go” mopes along in that long line of “whiny man” books — stories about white guys who just can’t seem to figure out why their lives aren’t going better. If you write like Hemingway or Updike, the whiny man’s plight can be transcendent and profound. But without that kind of stylistic magic and psychological insight, it’s like being trapped at Denny’s with an old friend from high school who’s just moved back in with his parents. [Read the full article...]
Advertisement
THE BLEEDING HILLS A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith. - 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
THE BLEEDING HILLS
