Review: Everything Matters! by Ron Currie

Imagine if you were born knowing the exact date and time that the world is going to end. Right from the beginning, it was an unquestioned fact that no matter what you do, there is nothing you can do to stop it. How would you live your life? Would it still matter?

Ron Currie argues that it would, in his novel 'Everything Matters!', which circles around main character Junior Thibodeau. The story cleverly opens with a Voice, which the reader can take to be whichever overarching deity he or she would prefer, communicating with him from the moment of conception. This voice stays with him throughout his life, initially describing his family circumstances to him before he's even aware as a singular entity, and occasionally showing up as a commentator. The conversation is never two-sided, and through this convention the author allows the reader to take a step back from the craziness that Junior's path becomes and evaluate the circumstances more calmly.

Junior is, understandably, a darkly serious child from early childhood. He lives with his secret in silence until his adolescence, when he decides to tell his longtime girlfriend the truth. This one step begins a long downward spiral that Junior can never seem to pull himself out of.

WARNING! PLOT REVELATIONS!

Frankly, this is where the book began to unravel for me. After awhile, the events that Junior experience become first a bit tiresome, and then increasingly ridiculous. He randomly meets a severely handicapped man who convinces him to go along in blowing up a major city building. He gets kidnapped and put in a foreign prison for seven years by the US govt in order to coerce him into helping scientists find a way to thwart the comet that is hurtling towards the earth. His father is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and (this was really the deal-breaking section for me) the government enables him to basically take over a lab so he can come up with a secret formula that will be shipped anonymously and cure the uncurable-by-world-renound-doctors cancer (yet he doesn't share this secret formula with anyone, so anyone else with the cancer will still die - nice). His former girlfriend finally believes him, only to be killed in a robbery. THEN, as if all that weren't enough, The Voices take pity on him and allow him to start his life over again, picking any version of his life he would like, so the final few chapters are a redo of a much better version of his life, but the world still ends as scheduled anyway.

END PLOT SECRET SECTION!

The reason that all the aforementioned plot points bother me, since I'm willing to accept the fact the the world is ending and that this person hears the voices in his head, etc, etc, but not the other fantastical portions of the book. The answer is simple - they felt incongruous. I could have accepted some of them, but they kept coming, and coming, and the quality of the connection between me as reader and Junior, which had been pretty great at first, was severely eroded. Not only were the twists odd, but they happened joltingly, and involved jumps of years into the future, with chapters on other people woven in that still maintained a connection with *those* characters, so I was left actually liking and feeling more bonded to the minor characters than the main one. It was very disappointing.

The final section of the book with Junior's newly chosen reality were very nice, almost like a short story, but it's obvious that the end is still coming, because they are still numbered in a countdown fashion rather than in the usual way. Plus, after going through the entire first three quarters of the book, it seemed a little choose-your-own-adventure-ish and not very organic, almost like the author couldn't decide what to do, so he did both ways. The last few chapters are very poignant and uplifting, yet still very sad because I couldn't help but imagine my own family in the same position.

I understand that what Currie was really trying to do is to show that, even though Junior's choices didn't seem to matter, because the ending was going to be the same regardless, it was what happened in the middle that was important, like that old cliche about playing the game. The idea was great, and I really liked the alternative numbering of the chapters. If the novel hadn't started veering wildly from event to event, I would have been very pleased. As it was, it was interesting enough to keep my attention, but mainly because I wanted to know how it all ended, not because I was enjoying the characters anymore.

Rating: three stars. Great beginning, OK ending, everything else could have been tighter and more realistic.