Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.

Review by Ryan Call
Tags: post-apocalypse

Everything Matters!, Ron Currie, Jr. Viking. 320pp, $25.95.

Ron Currie, Jr.’s second book, Everything Matters!, is an appropriate follow-up to his award-winning story collection God Is Dead. While the latter collects nine stories about a world fallen into chaos in the wake of God’s sudden death, the former is essentially pre-apocalyptic in nature. Rather than expanding from some disastrous origin point, the world of Everything Matters! contracts into a fiery and inevitable end, a conclusion punctuated by the Destroyer of Worlds, a giant comet that appears in the book’s final pages, obliterating the Earth and all of humankind. Far from spoiling the plot, foreknowledge of this ending operates within the novel as a kind of literary mechanism; it is not only readers of the novel who know that the end of the world is near but also the main character, and this awareness affects his every action.

Currie bestows this fateful knowledge upon one John “Junior” Thibodeau on the day of Junior’s birth in 1974. In the first chapter of the book, a voice, that of the semi-powerful, somewhat knowledgeable gods who partially narrate the story, speaks to Junior, telling him that a comet will destroy the Earth in thirty-six years, one hundred sixty-eight days, fourteen hours, and twenty-three seconds. The gods admit to knowing little else.

For example, we have no idea if you will live long enough to witness this phenomenon. There are things we can surmise, though, one being that if you are still alive when the comet hits, neither you nor anything else on the planet will be afterward. All of which raises the question—your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like—a question which men and women, great and not-so, of every color, creed, and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?

Why these gods have selected Junior for this task (one that previously chosen individuals have failed to live up to) is never made clear, though Currie’s book is such that an explanation would be unnecessary. After all (and the gods later make this same point), aren’t all of us chosen: at some moment in our lives we each become fully and rationally aware that our world must end. It is just this mortal disillusionment that the book creatively dramatizes, taking for its premise the following question: how would a person live his life if he knew from the moment of his birth the exact moment of his death and/or the end of the world? It is a question that Currie handles both imaginatively and splendidly, and the result of his experiment is indeed moving.

In short, Everything Matters! tells the life story of Junior Thibodeau, “the fourth smartest person in the history of the world.” The book begins at the moment of his conception and then follows his near fatal birth, his troubled childhood and love life, his struggles with depression and substance abuse, his involvement in a top secret government program to save the world, and his death. By the end of the story, Junior has experienced a range of emotions: he falls in love with Amy Benoit, an intelligent classmate of his, but their relationship is one characterized by miscommunications and missed opportunities, and his love is both a happy love and a sick love; he feels shock and sadness when his father—the stoic and impenetrable man who raised him, worked two jobs, and survived the Vietnam War—is diagnosed with cancer; he cares lovingly for his brother Rodney, who overcomes a drug problem (but not without suffering a severe mental handicap) to become a talented professional baseball player; he worries for the health of his mother Debbie, an alcoholic; and so on. Always overshadowing the entire breadth of his experiences is the question of mattering, a question that Junior ultimately does eventually answer (hint: see title) as the world ends.

As readers may have learned from God Is Dead, Currie’s writing seems to grow out of both an appreciation for a good plot twist and an unironic but comic sensibility, a fascination with creating alternative realities that are slightly skewed from our own. Everything Matters! succeeds not only for how well it combines the above into a novel-length story but also for how satisfying it is simply as a story, though a somewhat sad one. Despite the book’s tragic turns, Currie’s humor shines through to relieve us; this is most often evident in the descending numbered sections narrated by the gods, who in one instance matter-of-factly describe to Junior the sexual trauma he experiences in the womb as a kind of “betrayal”:

Although the biological goal of sex was achieved with conception, your father still has a hefty sexual appetite (as does your mother, though out of concern for you she will not admit it). To you his advances are terrifying.

The mix of deadpan, almost scientific diction with blunt observations works so well because although we read these words on the page, we must remember that the words are spoken by a real and literal voice that Junior hears in his head; we are reading exactly what Junior is simultaneously hearing. So despite what we might see as the voice’s many humorous quirks, the ultimate message the voice delivers is sobering, challenging, and bound up in destruction. Of the voice, Junior says, “It’s friendly and comforting and when I’m sad I listen to it. It doesn’t really make me feel better. Just bad in a different way. But it usually keeps me from crying.”

In addition to revealing to Junior and readers the intimate details of both his and others’ experiences and emotions, the voice also explains the world of the novel, which fittingly becomes more fantastic as the story grows. Many of the large-scale incidents that Junior witness or experiences either directly appear in our own world or nearly parallel it. These incidents are often life-changing for Junior: for instance, once Amy and Junior have broken up after college, his depression nearly drives him to help a handicapped drinking buddy suicide-bomb the Harold Washington Social Security Administration building in Chicago, just months after the Oklahoma City bombing. Junior decides not to go through with the plan after a moment of self-reflection in the van on the way to the building. The voice says of this realization:

For you, there is no anger, no joy, no indifference. There’s never been anything but the sorrow of loss, paid over and over and always in advance, and your determination to go forth in the face of that sorrow. There is nothing heroic about this doggedness; there may well be, in fact, something cowardly concealed within it.

It is this epiphany that makes him want to continue living despite his knowing that the world will end shortly. It is an important moment in his life, for afterwards he begins to appreciate the faint connections he has with his father, his mother, his brother, and Amy. This directly leads in to the book’s second half, where his attempts to both save the world and reunite with his loved ones. Currie highlights the importance of this shift by sending the book’s world farther into an alternate reality: among other turns, Junior successfully helps the government build a spaceship to escape the doomed Earth.

As to those Earthlings not fortunate enough to get a ticket on the spaceship, just when we expect the comet to strike Currie throws in the book’s major plot twist. The gods, perhaps deceitfully, reveal to Junior one final surprise, a surprise that I’ll leave for readers to discover, but it is a surprise nonetheless that makes clear the odd fantasy of the book and what might be called Currie’s confidently moral appreciation of the world. It is a revelation that would have sounded almost too didactic had Currie not worked so hard to prepare his readers for its meaning. For aside from the narrator-gods, whose chapters count down to the end of the world, the other characters in Junior’s life tell their own stories in alternating chapters. In this way, they become more than a supporting cast; we too witness their experiences, their failures and successes, their sadnesses and their fears, and each momentarily takes over as the main character. In many books of jut over 300 pages, spreading the narrative nearly evenly across so many characters might risk diluting the role of the hero, but here it works to uphold the title’s sentiment. For this really is the core of Currie’s novel. That, as the gods say, everything matters:

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got—your wife’s lips, your daughter’s eyes, your brother’s heart, your father’s bones and your own grief—and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all.

Ryan Call is a frequent contributor to The Quarterly Conversation.

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