This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

 

My brother-in-law lent this to us, with a strong recommendation, and after enjoying One Last Thing Before I Go greatly, a couple-few years ago, this moved up my priorities list--I'd been looking for it intermittently, with no success. Unsurprisingly, it has a lot in common with the other Tropper novel I've read, all banter and humor, skittering on the razor's edge between love and hate. Tropper's characters almost all have history with each other, here, that past fuels the anger and the love, the grudges and the emotional ties that keep them all bound to each other. Tropper's ear for dialogue is approximately unmatched, and his characters all feel real and distinct. The story drifts some, there's a little muddle around the middle, but it ends with the sort of clarity that makes the exact nature of what comes next irrelevant. It's a really good novel, and I'm happy to have read it.