This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper (2009)

Once again, I've read and hated a highly praised and well-blurbed novel. Supposedly, it's often hilarious and often heartbreaking; it's both poignant and lewd; it's tender and unexpectedly hilarious, not to mention artful and brilliant.

I thought This Is Where I Leave You seemed familiar, stitched out of worn patches cut from other books and movies. Let's examine the elements.

• We have a loud, dysfunctional, colorful ethnic family brought together by an inescapable family event that triggers everyone's buried resentments, bringing them to the surface, and by the end, tentatively resolving them. It could be almost any ethnicity—Italian, African American, Irish, Greek, Polish—so long as we've got loud, dysfunctional, and colorful. But Jewish allows the narrative structure of sitting shiva.

• We have a man-boy narrator at a crossroads in life, pretty much a nice guy, Tropper would have us understand, but has his faults. Judd discovered his wife fucking his boss (Howard Stern crossed with Rush Limbaugh), of course quit his job, and now is unemployed, facing divorce and alimony, and living in a rented basement. He's soft in the middle, not fat but soft, and life just won't hand him the lingerie models he deserves. Ha ha! He knows that's silly. (Right?) He's just so lonely.

• In the end, we have a renewed appreciation for family, and the stage is set for the crazy adventure that is life.

A less familiar element that becomes predictable:

• We have comic, violent little entr'actes that hilariously up-end tense moments. These are carefully studded through the book. After the first one, you can see them coming a mile away. I don't think Tropper meant to do that.

But it's narrator Judd Foxman who really bugs me. He's deep as a dime. His entire emotional response to every person he meets is based on what they look like, and for women, whether they get his dick hard. And boy, are most people ugly to Judd. It really bothers him. He's going for funny in his lacerating descriptions of old people, fat people, a nursing mother (with the pendulous breast that brother Phillip says "used to be a tit"—ha ha), but come on. Imperfect bodies are real life.

Worse: When he thinks about his wife Jen and what he misses about her, it's always her long smooth legs—"smooth" gets a workout as a favorite adjective for pretty women—and blonde hair. And he's unattractively whiny and cheated-feeling,  constantly consumed with resentment over not attracting the hot girls as a sports star, or his brother Phillip, would. Whatever slight self-awareness Judd may show, Tropper has it both ways, with Judd somehow managing to bed not one, but three women in this novel, two of them smooth.

This is where I leave you, Jonathan Tropper.