Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia [Paperback]

James Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1999

Highly acclaimed on its publication and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, Two Guys from Verona is a rare breed of novel, striking a powerful chord across the nation and making James Kaplan the unexpected voice of a generation. It's the fall of 1999 in the plush New Jersey suburbs, and Will and Joel are fortyish, friends since the second grade. Will is a successful, tired cardboard salesman with a mortgage, a pretty wife, and 2.2 kids. Joel lives with his moth and works at a sub shop. Joel's favorite pastime is cruising the dark streets in his rusted-out '74 Chevy, drinking whiskey from a brown paper bag. Will feels sorry for Joel. And Joel feels sorry for Will. But their twenty-fifth high school reunion will change both their lives in ways neither has dreamed of - one facing death, the other facing life for the first time. "A bittersweet elegy for what, not too long ago, looked like a spanking new American version of the promised land." - The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A 25th high school reunion is the catalyst for major changes in the lives of two old friends in this novel of suburbia, mid-life, and the millennium set in 1999. Will Weiss and Joel Gold, Verona High School, New Jersey, class of 1974, have taken very different paths since graduation. Will is manager of the company his father founded and leads a stable, middle-class life. Joel, who moved back home after a mysterious breakdown, spends his days working in a sub shop and cruising Verona in a crumbling 1974 Impala. As Will and Joel approach the reunion and the impending millennium, old friends resurface and old ghosts reappear, throwing their lives topsy-turvy. This is an insightful and ironic chronicle of second-generation suburban angst, very much in the tradition of Updike and Cheever. Recommended for public libraries.?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A pair of old high-school chums--one yuppie-rich, the other a slightly schizo slacker living at home with Mom--change places in this witty, unexpectedly moving take on our (shallow, consumerist, frantic) times. Second-novelist Kaplan (Pearl's Progress, 1989), also author of The Airport (1994 nonfiction), begins with two guys from Verona, New Jersey, facing their 25th high-school reunion. Will Weiss is the one with the new car, the second wife (Gail), the two kids, and little to look forward to except for some sexual fantasies and the distant goal of cashing in on a million bucks if and when his father finally sells the family business. Joel Gold is the one who works at a Sub Shop and, when not transfixed by the slippery colors of things (``there are at least four thousand greens''), likes to drive his ancient Impala to the house of his long-ago girlfriend and brood. (He also hears voices and guzzles Wild Turkey; he's never really recovered, it seems, from a posthigh-school breakdown.) As the Dow hits 10,000 and the millennium approaches, the promise of lucre deludes Will with visions of new toys (and sex with a mobster's wife) and lures Gail into adultery with a realtor (whose seduction line involves a walk-in closet). Meantime, Joel quietly, eccentrically, connects the dots on the scandal that broke his head and heart so many years before: the rape and subsequent meltdown of his former flame by Will's current tennis partner. When the stock market crashes, Joel, in short order, finds himself running the Sub Shop (now a coffee bar) as the father of a long-lost daughter--while Will is sleeping on his sofa, bereft of family, job, and sanity. Nervy, packed with stinging riffs on consumer rituals and passions: fiction that dares to hold a mirror up to our laughable, worrisome souls. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (March 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802136230
• ISBN-13: 978-0802136237
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,184,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

JAMES KAPLAN has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, as well as noted fiction (Best American Short Stories), for over three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurley Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His first novel, Pearl's Progress, was published by Knopf in 1989. His nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport, The Airport (1994) -- called "a splendid book" by Gay Talese -- remains a classic of aviation literature and New York storytelling. His second novel, Two Guys From Verona -- published in 1998 by Atlantic Monthly Press, and chosen by The New York Times as one of its Notable Books of the Year -- is being developed as a movie by Jeremy Garelick, screenwriter of The Break-Up and The Hangover. In 2002 Kaplan co-authored the autobiography of John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious, which was an international bestseller (and number one on the New York Times list). His 2005 book Dean and Me: A Love Story, co-written with Jerry Lewis and published by Doubleday, was a New York Times bestseller as well. In November 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's definitive biography of Frank Sinatra. The book was also a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen by Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani as one of her Top Ten Books of 2010. James Kaplan lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons. You can visit his website at www.jameskaplan.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of baby boomers in suburbia, August 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia (Hardcover)

Frankly, I bought Two Guys From Verona because I grew up in Cedar Grove, the New Jersey town that neighbors Verona. And when I read the jacket copy comparing Kaplan's fiction to Updike, Salinger, and Cheever, I thought I was being set up for a big disappointment. Quite to the contrary, the book swept aside my reservations from the moment I opened it. I was drawn into the lives of Kaplan's incredibly engaging characters and the wonderfully tense situations he creates for them. I found myself compelled to recount every scene to my girlfriend who also hung on every word. If the book has any fault, it is its all-to-quick wrap-up; I would have preferred the loose ends to remain unravelled. Though I am a lifelong reader, it is the rare book that "I can't put down." Two Guys From Verona is one such book.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautiful and troubling, June 20, 1999

By 

Slade Allenbury (Placerville, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia (Paperback)

"Two Guys From Verona" is a beautifully written book about a couple of characters so realistic you could probably lift samples of their DNA from the typeface. Like most worthwhile works of art, however, it leaves the reader pondering some troubling questions. For instance, I wasn't sure why one of the characters, who is portrayed as kind and decent, agreed to allow a rapist to adopt her newborn daughter. Also, Kaplan's odd couple -- Will Weiss and Joel Gold -- seem throughout the book to be acting out a virtual parable of the wages of materialism: Weiss is made miserable by his constant need for more money, while Gold appears to be slightly happier because he prefers simple pleasures (cruising in his Impala, writing poetry) to the obsessive quest for money and material gain. Thus the revelation in the end that Gold is actually the more materially wealthy of the two seems a bit confusing. Is Kaplan telling us that it's okay to amass large sums of money as long as you don't let its accumulation rule your life? At any rate, there is plenty of ambiguity in the book, which makes it all the more enjoyable to read. I suspect one could read this novel a dozen times and never fathom its depths entirely. James Kaplan's "Two Guys From Verona" is one of the few books about the end of this century that is likely to be around for the end of the next one as well.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting characters, but 2 guys need a life and an editor, June 25, 2001

By 

gleka (new jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia (Paperback)

i grew up in new jersey territory covered by book. found moods and characters evocative and often moving. james kaplan can clearly write--often beautifully and lyrically. he is way too in love with his own voice, however, his description of places and things and people often painfully overdrawn and convoluted. we get it: he knows language. but sometimes a sentence fewer than 10 lines long, with fewer than 6 parentheticals and dashes, isn't a tragedy. it's exhausting reading the sometimes overblown and tediously and needlessly complexly woven sentence structures around secondary and terciary characters and story elements. there were times i wanted to shout, get to the point, say it more simply and clearly. one less adjective please; use 6 adjectives in the sentence instead of 11. this isn't graduate school fiction writing in which you're trying to impress your colleagues and professor.

having said that, kaplan's observations about suburban life--its foibles and flaws and eccentricities--are often sharp and great fun. so are some of the nuances of his core characters. sometimes his references and comments dazzle.

what's not so sharp are some of the critical plot developments and resolutions. too neat and simple and quick. why, for example, wouldn't core character joel have investigated more carefully the disappearance of his beloved girl friend (cindy) years earlier? it makes no sense that he would have waited so long to visit the hospital from which she disappeared just after high school. and why, when "relatively" early in the story he learned that cindy had a local daughter, didn't he jump all over that, and confront the "supposed" very accessible father. joel's life transformation after finally finding and meeting cindy--from borderline schizophrenic and complete screw up to proprietor of a suburban coffee house--is equally implausible. it all happens way too fast and without necessary development.

the ending, and the weaving together of various plot lines, reads too much like a hollow hollywood movie. kaplan clearly can do better than that.

he's created the edges of something very special here. i was hooked; i read much of the book eagerly. i just wish he filled in more of the content with a little less attention to style and a little more to reality--the real shapes and patterns of real human interactions and dynamics.