This Book Review originally appeared in The Post & Courier, July 17, 2005

EVERYTHING CHANGES.  By Jonathan Tropper.  Delacorte Press.  335 pages. $20.

A thread of blood in a passing of urine and the reappearance of a long-lost deadbeat dad: unrelated events that will nonetheless work in concert to change the course of Zachary King’s life. 

On the verge of marrying beautiful Fifth Avenue-bred Hope, Zack juggles voice mail and e-mail messages by the hundreds as he middle-manages high dollar manufacturing contracts.  He lives in a brownstone with his independently wealthy best friend, Jed.

Potential and promise surrounds Zack and Jed, but since the accidental death of their mutual best friend, Rael, they have chosen to act on none of it.  Jed spends his days staring into the television, casually tossing money at whatever problems happen to appear.  Zack allows years to slip by working a job he secretly loathes and leaving screenplays half-written.  Even his engagement to Hope, he realizes, is simply a failure to act.  He doesn’t love her.  He is in love with Tamara, Rael’s widow.

As the title promises, however, everything is about to change. 

“Dr. Sanderson holds up something that looks like a miniature plumber’s snake and describes the horrific procedure he’s about to perform,” Tropper writes.  The cystoscopy reveals a mass on the wall of Zack’s bladder.  A biopsy follows.  Zack tries to simultaneously come to terms with the possibility of cancer and the question of why his father has suddenly resurfaced.

Along the way, we get hilarious country club chase scenes and an impromptu bare knuckle brawl over a used car sold to Zack’s mentally impaired younger brother by a local con artist.  Tropper’s prose is sharp, alternating laugh-out-loud funny with slow, sad moments and the out-and-out tragic.  “Everything Changes” is a comic novel with great heart and dead-on honesty, looking straight into the sad mix of regret and possibility that loss can bring.

 Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker is a freelance writer based in Charleston.

Return to review samples page