How to Talk to a Widower: A Novel (Bantam Discovery) [Paperback]

Jonathan Tropper (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 24, 2008 | Series: Bantam Discovery

"Beautifully crafted", "Fantastically funny." "Compulsively readable." Jonathan Tropper has earned wild acclaim—-and comparisons to Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta—for his biting humor and insightful portrayals of families in crisis and men behaving badly. Now the acclaimed author of The Book of Joe and Everything Changes tackles love, lust, and lost in the suburbs—in a stunning novel that is by turns heartfelt and riotously funny.

Doug Parker is a widower at age twenty-nine, and in his quiet suburban town, that makes him something of a celebrity—the object of sympathy, curiosity, and, in some cases, unbridled desire. But Doug has other things on his mind. First there's his sixteen year-old stepson, Russ: a once-sweet kid who now is getting into increasingly serious trouble on a daily basis. Then there are Doug's sisters: his bossy twin, Clair, who's just left he husband and moved in with Doug, determined to rouse him from his Grieving stupor. And Debbie, who's engaged to Doug's ex-best friend and manically determined to pull off the perfect wedding at any cost.

Soon Doug's entire nuclear family is in his face. And when he starts dipping his toes into the shark-infested waters of the second-time around dating scene, it isn't long before his new life is spinning hopelessly out of control, cutting a harrowing and often hilarious swath of sexual missteps and escalating chaos across the suburban landscape.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A portrait of a modern guy in crisis, Tropper's third novel (Everything Changes; The Book of Joe) follows Doug Parker, whose life is frozen into place at 29 when Hailey, his wife of two years, is killed in a plane crash. Unable to leave the tony suburban house they once shared, he spends his days reliving their brief marriage from the moment he found her sobbing in his office over troubles with her first husband. At the same time, Doug's magazine column about grieving for his wife has made him irresistible to the media (book deals, television spots and the like are proffered) and to a wide array of women who find him "slim, sad and beautiful." Though stepson Russ is getting in trouble at school and Doug's pregnant twin sister, Claire, moves in, no amount of crying to strippers can keep Doug from the temptations of his best friend's wife or Russ's guidance counselor. Alternately flippant and sad, Tropper's book is a smart comedy of inappropriate behavior at an inopportune time. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Mixing pathos and comedy in equal measure, Tropper (Everything Changes, 2005) tells the story of "slim, sad, and beautiful" Doug Parker. A year after his wife Hailey's death in a plane crash, 29-year-old widower Doug is still grieving heavily and has abandoned all pretense at civility and discretion. When people ask him how he's doing, he makes the mistake of actually telling them the truth, which inevitably includes a catalog of his antidepressant medications and his ongoing nightmares. Yet people keep making demands on him: his sweet, emotionally bereft stepson wants Doug to adopt him; Doug's twin sister, Claire, wants to set him up on a series of blind dates; and his agent is pressuring him to write a book as a spin-off of his wildly popular magazine column on mourning, but Doug refuses to become the "poster boy for young widowers." With superb comic timing, Tropper keeps the sappiness at bay by juxtaposing tender scenes that often feature Doug's reminiscences about meeting and marrying his wife with very funny, often vitriolic dialogue. Wilkinson, Joanne
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385338910
• ISBN-13: 978-0385338912
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (93 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Tropper is the author of How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B. He lives with his family in Westchester, New York, where he teaches writing at Manhattanville College.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars So I have a new favorite book... July 29, 2007

By K. Hinton VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Doug Parker is a widower. A beautiful, slim, sad man who is obsessed with mourning his wife and being consumed with grief. A year after his wife's death in a plane crash, Doug finds himself unwilling to move on. His job as a magazine writer affords him the sort of solitary lifestyle wherein he doesn't need to even leave his house to go to work. He can sit at home, drown his sorrows in Jack Daniels, avoid phone calls from his friends and family, and mourn. Because what else is a 29-year-old widower supposed to do?

Enter Doug's twin sister, Claire. Claire, notorious for her potty mouth and unwillingness to take no for an answer, is determined that Doug get himself back on the market, the first step of which is to get him laid. Temporarily moving in with him, Claire sets out to find Doug a companion among the rich, suburban divorcees in his neighborhood. Along with Claire comes Doug's stepson, Russ. Since his mother's death, Russ has been getting into more and more trouble at school, smoking pot, and getting tattoos. Though Doug has semi-washed his hands of the situation (he isn't really Russ's stepfather anymore, is he?), he can't help but feel partially responsible as he watches the boy falling apart. Together, these three learn to navigate the twists and turns of grief, familial obligation, and moving on.

When the book starts out Doug is one of the saddest, most broken characters I've ever read, but his wit, self-deprecating charm, and fierce love for his wife make him the sort of man who you just want to put back together again. My heart broke for the shattered remnants of his happiness and, over the course of the novel as I watched him slowly rebuild what he'd lost, I only became more emotionally involved with the story. The supporting characters, most notably Russ and Claire, are also richly drawn and entertaining in a way that makes me appreciate my own dysfunctional family.

Jonathan Tropper's newest novel isn't just a story about grief, though the undertone is there. It's not simply a story about loss, though to discredit its place in the story would be a lie. It's, in the truest sense of the term, a love story. One that broke my heart and threatens to do so again and again because, though I am not a person who rereads books, I already can't wait until enough time has passed that I can read this story again and get lost in the characters, the emotions, and the sense of utter fulfillment I felt when I finished it. This book isn't just good, it's spectacular. It's of a caliber that I would, and will, hand it out as gifts for birthdays and Christmas because it's the type of thing that you just have to pay forward. I don't give out five-star reviews like candy at Halloween, and I don't gush about books just for the sake of doing it, hopefully after reading this review you'll understand what an exceptional book this was and be tempted to try it for yourself.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars ROUGH DRAFT July 10, 2011

By JoeV VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Having read and enjoyed this author's latest book, This Is Where I Leave You, I picked up this earlier Tropper novel. The protagonist - our widower - is 29 year old Doug Parker, a somewhat likeable ne'er do well, who is a year into grieving the tragic death of his wife. Doug is not handling his loss well, wallowing in self-pity, (and booze), and barely paying attention. The reader spends a lot of time inside Doug's head - actually too much - co-basting in his grief, privy to his happy memories and given a front row seat to his sexual fantasies.

In the real world, Doug has a teenage stepson - the dearly departed Mrs. Parker was 11 years older than her hubby - who shares both Doug's loss and his emotional maturity level. Doug's comedic dysfunctional family is very concerned about him and in their own special way decides to help him out of his funk. This is all very reminiscent of This Is Where I Leave You. In fact this novel reads like an unpolished earlier version of that book and unfortunately, is nowhere near as entertaining.

The specific differences between the two stories are superficial, otherwise the books' plots, characters, family dynamics and even the dialog are very, very much the same. Both read like screenplays - again for the same movie - but with the Widower's protagonist less likeable; the "flow" less even and the "jokes" less funny. (The silly fairy tale ending to Widower doesn't help either.)

So my suggestion - skip this book and read the finished product, This Is Where I Leave You.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny and touching July 31, 2007

By J. Luiz

Format:Hardcover

Jonathan Tropper just keeps getting better and better. This book and his last, Everything Changes, are just terrific, fun reads. You wouldn't think that the tale of a young windower having trouble with his grief could make for such a funny and insightful read, but Tropper manages to make this subject neither maudlin nor repetitive. This is both voice- and plot-driven fiction, and Tropper has mastered in each of his novels that cynical male with a hard-shell of sarcasm lying over a sensitive, feeling-full interior. As other reviews will note, the main plot line is about a young widower overcome with grief who also has to deal with the unruly teenager his late wife left behind. In the meantime, he also has an outrageous twin sister who's just left her rich husband because he's boring, another sister whom he's angry with for meeting her fiance at his house when he sat shiva for his wife, an alcoholic mother, and a once brilliant, but now senile, father who shows flashes of his former competence in between episodes of playing baseball in his underwear on his mansion's front lawn. Tropper actually manages to stir this soup of outrageous characters very effectively. There's little subtext here -- all the dramatic situations are right out there and just one step shy of being over the top -- but they're not. It seems to me that he can pull this all off because he has some amazing writing talents. There's a scene of the main character's blind date with a recent divorcee that is told entirely in the chatty woman's voice -- four to five pages of uninterrupted dialogue (in the form of monologue) that gives you a hysterical impression of just how badly the entire night went. The man can turn a phrase -- and while his observations are rarely unique -- that the suburbs are vapid and overly materialistic, as one example -- Tropper has the writing chops to make you marvel at the freshness of the language he uses to convey those opinions. If you're looking for a light, entertaining, very well written read, I highly recommend this book.