By Jonathan Tropper
Orion, NZ$27 | Reviewed by Laura Fergusson

I ARRIVED home after flying in from London and found the review copy of this novel waiting for me. I began to read it in the vague, dazed state of anyone who has been up for 40 hours, flown 12,000 miles, and is looking for something to distract them until it is permissible to go to bed, and anticipated that within ten pages I would be asleep, no matter how good it was. Instead, I finished the 341st and final page over lunch the following day.

Widowed and living in the suburbs is not where Doug Parker imagined he would be at 29. Having shocked his parents by marrying a divorced mother 10 years his senior, he finds himself stranded after her sudden death in a world of middle-aged investment bankers, with whom he can no longer pretend to have anything in common. More urgently, he has to renegotiate his relationship with his teenage stepson and his own troubled family, while struggling with a grief which finds him unable to get out of bed without a shot of Jack Daniels.

Tropper is good on grief. He taps into the way it can sneak up on you even when, for a year, it has been the default position – the way an impulse to tell something to someone who is no longer around to hear it can knock you flat when you thought you could go no flatter. He is right about the way it sometimes seems necessary to pick at the scab, to make it hurt all over again to remind yourself how searing it feels, out of a terror that one day it won’t be so agonising, “and then I’ll know she’s gone for good.”

Despite the power of his exploration of mourning, Tropper is also extremely funny. The book has some fantastic dialogue, particularly between Doug and his family, and is both hilarious and poignant on the difficulties of re-entering the romantic market.

However there are some banalities. The neurotic, slightly off-the-wall, wealthy Jewish family, father a successful surgeon unable to express his emotions until after his stroke, mother a pill-popping drama queen. While entertaining, the Parkers feel plucked from any of a hundred comedies over the past 20 years. Similarly Russ, the stepson, a “good kid” who deals with the trauma of his mother’s death by getting stoned and into regular fights, doesn’t amount to much more than the sum of his clichés.

Every female character is predictably, impossibly beautiful, from Hailey the dead wife to Doug’s sisters, Russ’s guidance counsellor, and the inevitable horny housewife next door. And Tropper also exercises the author’s prerogative to dress them as he’d like to see them. Short skirts, push-up bras, low-cut tops and heels. All at once. All the time. Really, Jonanthan?

But while that the characters may not be hugely original, their emotions are convincing. An honest, accurate portrayal of grief which has anyone who has suffered bereavement nodding with recognition, and a light, buzzy comedy? That’s quite a potent combination to pull off, and for the most part Tropper has succeeded.