Everything Matters

As others from class have mentioned, this book was extremely depressing to me and, honestly, I had a great deal of trouble making myself read it. With respect to plot, I understand that all families are troubled to some extent. I know that my own was and is. But I found the continual horrificness (yes, I made that up) a bit over the top. Instead of reading with interest to see what would happen next, I found the plot cumbersome and a burden. It was one sad episode after another. When I think of this book as compared to Going Bovine, I am startled by the fact that they are both about impending, unavoidable demise and each end as such. But at least with Bovine, there were a lot of laughs along the way.

Admittedly, I was repulsed by the first few pages of the book. I'm not sure why the author felt compelled to include fetal memories at all. But since he did, why on earth must there be included the sexual encounter between the parents? If it's supposed to represent the fact that all of us eventually come to terms with the "facts of life," then it's a pretty poor stretch.

I also found the retro approach to the past several decades interesting, but I was annoyed that there was a cable box in the 70s based on Junior's age. Cable boxes didn't come along until the 80's, so that was off-putting for me.

While the switch in narrators gave better insight into the characters, I also found myself having to do a lot of page flipping to recall who the narrator was at times. And although I felt like I understood the characters better, I also found that there really weren't any of them who I could let myself care about because there were just so few redeeming moments in the story or redeeming qualities in the characters.