Author Jonathan Tropper, whose bestselling This is Where I Leave You just came out in paperback, doesn’t try to be funny. But that didn’t keep this novel about a family that comes together to sit shiva after the death of its patriarch — a serious subject if anyone can think of one — from being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Piled on top of the mourning came infidelity, infertility and, given another day or so in familial captivity, near-infanticide. Tropper spoke with JTNews just before his July 28 reading at Elliott Bay Books.
JTNews: You’ve got a few books under your belt. What’s the career of Jonathan Tropper?
Jonathan Tropper: This is my fifth novel. Of the five I’ve written it’s the first one of that has any kind of Jewish content in it. It was a plot device that worked, I didn’t have any larger comment about shiva or grieving or mourning or religion, it was just that I needed a way to keep these characters together for a week that otherwise wouldn’t last more than a few hours in each other’s company. So I used the shiva as a contrivance.
In my other four books, they’re all kind of about men coming to terms with their lives and relationships and family in that upper-middle-class social pressure that pushed them in one direction until they realized probably a little too late that wasn’t necessarily where they needed to be. There’s something very Jewish about that, too, even though there wasn’t anything Jewish in those books.
I was actually a little nervous about using the shiva, wondering if that would greatly diminish the readability of the book to a broader audience, but it turned out to have the opposite effect. This book has done significantly better than my other ones.
JT: Have you found that with these different audiences you speak to that something different resonates?
Tropper: I think everyone, Jews, non-Jews alike, just relates to this family. There are enough siblings, and the mother, and their histories and their inability to get past things in their youth — it’s kind of like striking gold if you hit that right family nerve that so many people just feel, “God, that’s like my family, or maybe not like my family but I could see how my family could be like that.”
JT: So is your family like that?
Tropper: No, they’re not. Mine’s much more boring.
JT: The vibe of the remembrance really had an old, institutional feel, like that ‘60s and ‘70s Conservative tradition. Why that?
Tropper: This is a family that grew up with nothing. Their father was an atheist, and they don’t relate to this at all. They weren’t going to go and observe an Orthodox shiva, but at the same time, I didn’t want to go too far away from what the basic traditions were. Portraying it in this kind of novel waters it down enough, and I didn’t want to make it a shiva that had zero ritual and kind of just lose the meaning what a shiva is. I had to give them some kind of structure. So yeah, it does probably feel like something right in the middle there, like a Conservative shiva, seven days, not three, and stuff like that.
JT: Everything kept building on everything — you could really feel like you were sitting in that house as the tension grew. Was there any sort of experience in your life you drew from to create this experience?
Tropper: Not really. The goal was to create these five characters — the mother and her four kids — and put them in this pressure cooker where no one can leave, and that is going to build. The
resentments are going to build, the tensions are going to build, and in what some of them are going through, whether it’s [narrator Judd’s] wife’s infidelity or Alice’s infertility, or Wendy or the mom and her situation and obviously these people are going to be stepping over each other until something explodes.
JT: I was cracking up throughout your book, but I gave it to some female friends and they didn’t appreciate it as much. Is this what you’re seeing in your experience?
Tropper: I have significantly more female fans than male fans, because I think that’s the balance of who reads novels. I’ve heard very positive feedback from females. I’ve heard one or two who were a little scared — “Do men really think like that?” And it’s on purpose that the main character here sexualizes every woman he meets because he’s grappling with, in a sense, the loss of his own manhood. His wife was sleeping with another man for 14 months, so he’s trying to rediscover that. So no, I haven’t found that actually.
JT: So when you’ve written a novel that gets people to laugh, do you often run into people who demand that you say something funny?
Tropper: When I talk and I read and I answer questions and stuff, I do try to be funny and get some laughs and engage people, but when people say, “Oh, you should have been a standup comic,” they don’t understand that writing humor and delivering it are two very different things. I have plenty of time to go back and hone my lines over and over again until they’re exactly the way I want them to be.
I do chafe a little bit when people call it a comic novel, because I don’t think of it as a comic novel. That’s just how I write. The comedy facilitates a certain brutal honesty. You can admit certain things, you can examine certain things, and make them more palatable with a little bit of humor.
JT: Is that your experience with your own family?
Tropper: Maybe it’s an East Coast New York thing. I’ve always felt myself more an observer than a participant, which I think a lot of writers feel. I notice a lot and I take in a lot, and it registers, and I save it and at some point it comes out in the writing.
When I’m really heavy in a novel I’ll sometimes get ideas in the middle of the night and literally leave myself voice mails. And then the next day I’ll turn on my phone and I’ll have three voicemails, and they’ll all be from me. Just reminding myself of ideas or phrases or things I want to say or a character to do or things like that.
JT: And your wife is like, “Shut up, I’m trying to sleep”?
Tropper: No, she sleeps through a lot.