good read: The Book of Joe

I preface this post by confessing my desperate need to fill my life with a profusion of books. I worship the power of books, and how they transport the reader into another world. I tend to read books for many different reasons: a good plot, incredible characters, remarkable writing, or sometimes just as a means of escape. Also, I value books for scores of reasons, thus not being able to define what makes a “good book” by means of one or two defining characteristics; though, if I had to, I guess a “good book” to me is one that sticks with me for an extended period of time—whether it be a moment, or a lifetime.


I recently read Jonathan Tropper’s The Book of Joe, and though I wouldn’t consider it delicious writing, I would argue that it is real writing. Not very often—and I think this is due to the complexity of the task—does a writer craft a novel with a style that employs the habits of everyday life. The casual manner in which Tropper tells his story allows readers to feel a certain closeness to his characters—not necessarily because they are tremendously developed, nor are they underdeveloped—through the fierceness of truth that lies behind each and every one of them.

Tropper sets his narrative in a fictional Connecticut town (much to my gleeful surprise), a town that could potentially exist anywhere, and probably does. His main character deals with the all-to familiar circumstances that force some of us to go back to the town we grew up in and face the warped memories we have shaped, abandoned, reshaped, and forgotten. The clumsiness in which Tropper’s character does this, reminds us all of the difficulties of growing up, and of the ease with which we tend to bury our past. Only when we return to our childhood can we justly grow as adults.

All in all, I struggled with the idea of this book as a whole, yet when I finished reading the very last page, and took my customary moment of literary digestion, did I finally feel the ambiance of Tropper’s novel. It stuck with me for about two days, leaving me wondering what elements of my past and childhood I may have forced to lay dormant all these years; it also comforted me in knowing that the lapses in memory that suddenly become vividly alive in mere seconds once the mind gives in happen to everyone.