Manyebook

It Won't Always Be This Great

In the crushing complacency of suburbia, mid-life crises pop in on men's lives unannounced. For one Long Island podiatrist, it takes an impromptu act of vandalism just to make him aware of his own being. Walking home in the sub-zero wind chill of a Friday night, he stumbles on a bottle of horseradish and mindlessly hurls it through the window of a popular store selling over-sexed tween fashions. This one tiny, out-of-character impulse turns his life vivid and terrifying, triggering waves of fear, crooked cops, and suspicions of antisemitism, both accurate and paranoid.

The story is told by this same podiatrist, an often hysterical, endearingly wide-eyed, and entirely nameless narrator, to what he regards as the perfect audience: a comatose college friend. Yet, our narrator s most unique quality lies simply in his glowing love for his wife Alyse, the girl of his dreams whom he met in college and still can t quite believe he attained. She is the mother of his two children, Esme and Charlie, who are just starting to come into their own minds and experiencing their first encounters with prejudice.

Prior to the bottle throwing incident, our narrator had just enough going on to keep him interested in his own life. Now he s way too interested. Friends and neighbors push his new intrigue-filled existence into wildly unpredictable places, especially nineteen year old Audra Uziel, a long-time patient whose plantar warts have given way to brilliance, rebelliousness, sexiness, and a taste for happily married men.

And oh: Audra also happens to be the daughter of Nat Uziel, self-proclaimed neighborhood patriarch business owner and owner of the store whose window the horseradish bottle smashed. Nat, always loudly on the lookout for antisemitism, doesn't know the true culprit but doesn't let that stop him from whipping his neighborhood into a frenzy, forcing our narrator into hiding in plain sight.

Pushed to the edge by his own desires, despairs, and disappointments, our narrator is about to find out what it s like to become a criminal, and what his excruciatingly dull neighborhood looks like when it s been turned upside down.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 374
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781610881357
  • Genres
  • fiction
  • Release date
  • 2014