What Matters?

I finished reading Everything Matters by Ron Currie, Jr. last week but wanted to wait a bit before writing about the novel. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because the last pages are still echoing in my mind, like a bell vibrating long after being struck. Currie has a distinctive and distinctly modern voice and I recognize in his writing if not direct influences than certainly reminders of other writers I love: he is like a modern Vonnegut, but with less ironic detachment and more poignancy; he is less full of himself than John Irving but writes with the same grand, epic, message-delivery type of style; his portrait of small-town life is as gritty, gutsy, and funny as Richard Russo's stories of small New England towns. I have a feeling that this is a book I will remember for a long time.

The basic premise is that a child is born and, thanks to an all-knowing God-like voice that he hears throughout his life (written to us in the second-person), he learns the exact date that the earth will end via a collision with a comet. The title character, Junior (perhaps a stand-in for Currie, Jr.), lives a tortured, troubled life, a tragic existence dominated by the overwhelming shadow of death, of non-existence. He is sent home from school for drawing monstrous, violent pictures, then placed in a "special" class where he meets the love of his life, Amy. Amy's own life is a horror, too, with a violently abusive mother, but she and Junior find a connection that sustains them, until the day he finally gets up the courage to tell her about the voice he hears and what he has learned. How does knowing the ultimate end of everything change--or not change--the way you live your life?

Everything Matters is a strange book in many ways but haunting nonetheless, filled with damaged souls, from the physcially deformed (his father lost two fingers in Vietnam; crazy-ass Reggie Fox, the paraplegic; Rodney, Junior's mentally challenged older brother) to the psychically deformed (Junior's silent, alcoholic mother; Amy, Junior). Each person has their story and their pain; Currie makes each of their stories distinctive and different, but all filled with pain and longing. Everyone wants something different--happiness, peace, respect, love--and they don't know how to get it.

The "God" chapters (which are numbered, counting down to the end, with one final twist) sound the most like Vonnegut, filled with wise humor and ironic detachment. The voice knows everything there is to know and seems to enjoy revealing the secrets that only it (or he...or she) can know due to its omniscience: the secret thoughts, desires, and memories of every being in the world. The book twists and turns, but Currie has a way of making the implausible, plausible.

I also wondered why the cover was filled with so many different comets. Is it related to the idea of the multiverse, which is in itself a very Vonnegutian idea, the idea that one self always exists at a particular moment and that multiple selves branch off from that moment—every moment—along with the butterfly effect-ian idea that you don't know how a small moment can change things, how one small action, no matter how small, has the power to alter the universe—you step on a bumble bee, one thing happens; you don't step on it, the bee lives on, affecting lives so far down the road, you wouldn't be able to connect the two events if you tried.

Big ideas, powerful ideas. Not new ideas, perhaps, but certainly worth pondering. In Currie's world (and our own), teetering with the spectre of nuclear annihalation, haunted by the images of towers falling, and entertained with cinematic visions of the end of the world, you wonder how anything can mean anything--does it really matter what you say or do or believe? But in the end, after you turn the last page of this deeply affecting, strange novel, you understand why everything matters, even when nothing should matter.