“This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control… to try and control is to go mad.”
Ron Currie Jr’s Everything Matters is a remarkably confounding and beautiful book that takes us into the mind of ‘the fourth smartest person on earth’ to experience the end of the world that is certain to arrive thirty-six years, one hundred sixty-eight days, fourteen hours, and twenty-three seconds from the beginning of the book on June 15, 2010 at 3:44PM Eastern Standard Time. Set in locations familiar to me in Maine, Junior Thibodeau must navigate what it means to be burdened with the inscrutable truth that the end is nigh, while we pivot between the present, the past, and even his birth to question what it means to be tied to family, fate, and family dysfunction, and where free will and insignificance hums beneath our consciousness to create the only version of reality we see through our experiential perspectives
“What does being an adult teach you, daily, if not how to function in the face of fear?”
Rather than being a dystopian fantasy where we face the depression and hopelessness of a child carrying this knowledge the second he exits the womb, we are guided by a disembodied voice that narrates the existential dread and depression in a very real version of our world. This emotional, character-driven work is mainly a family history that careens through time and space to face down the inevitable with Junior. A domestic drama that reminded me of the subtlety of Lars Von Trier’s absolutely crushing Melancholia, another domestic story that relies on the pedestrianness of the end of the world and its implications.
“People can get used to almost anything. That’s both the best and worst thing about us.”
Junior’s life is less about the end, but rather the cynicism of the irony of the title of the book itself. Everything, in fact, doesn’t matter in this book, precisely because nothing matters and everything eventually ends. Junior’s dad philandering and losing a finger while at war, Junior navigating relationships and crappy jobs with the knowledge that the point of what we have built our modern society up about is going to collapse, no matter how hard he tries. And, oh, the horrors of bringing children into the doomed world – that same concern we think about every day in the face of the news cycles covering war and global warming, our selfishness and egos humming ”me, me, me,” and no regard for even ourselves and our needs because that voice is so strong, the laws so ironclad, the hamster wheel of hedonism spinning ever faster… to what?
The void.
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one…. Maybe the point of life was that it didn’t last forever.”
And that same void will meet all of us when the light goes out no matter what we do. And in a way, that is why everything matters. Because none of it truly does, asteroid, bomb, famine, pandemic, or someone simply unplugging the machine at hospice in your one hundredth year.
“People can survive almost anything, provided they see the end in sight. But human beings can’t survive a lifetime.”
Currie’s novel was a beautiful revelation in its youthful energy, its humor, and labyrinthine organization through time. It was really, really cool. Really, really funny. It has a sadness, comedy, joy, hope, and despair I haven’t seen since Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. It’s a very difficult book to describe beyond the concrete backbone, but well worth the journey and refreshingly acute in its emotional scope that somehow avoids hard science fiction and eye-rolling sentimentality. Moreover, the best quality of this book is its aphorisms – endlessly quotable like a good Foer, Vonnegut, or even Douglas Adams. A great read that I am grateful to my friend for his recommendation, librarian WIlliam Kline.
Garrett Zecker 