And what is comedy, after all, except the living thumbing their noses at the dead? Comedies in all eras have mocked the mortality of the body, with its flatulence and incontinence and weird sexual fetishes, its need to piss and shit, while also celebrating that mortality as something to be cherished specifically because it is temporary. I know that there were other examples too – so many that my mind had trained me to think of an urn full of ashes as little more than a comic prop (and it doesn’t help that they’re sometimes called “cremains”). The example that comes most immediately to mind is an episode of Married…With Children in which Al Bundy loses someone’s ashes and then has to sneak around in the neighbors’ yards stealing ashes from their barbeques until he has enough to fill the urn back up. A little bit more contemplation alerted me to the fact that I thought ashes ALWAYS get lost, stolen, or spilled because that’s what always happens on TV and in the movies. When I asked myself why I was so fixated on these possible mixups, my answer was something like because that’s what ALWAYS happens. When my mom died and I was given her ashes to drive home (did you know that you have to have a special license to drive your mother’s ashes in your car? True story, but a digression nonetheless), I was absolutely convinced that sooner or later someone was going to spill the ashes, or lose the ashes, or get the ashes mixed up with someone else’s. The death-themed comedy has a long history, of course. Judd and his three siblings gather in their family home with their mother, Hillary, a neighbor named Linda, and Linda’s son Horry, who dated Judd’s sister Wendy back in high school, before he was beaten badly in a fight and developed a permanent neurological condition that makes him dependent on his mother. Judd receives a call from his sister informing him that their father has died and that his final request was that the family – a secular brood if ever there was one – sit shiva for him.

The protagonist and first-person narrator is Judd Foxman, who has recently separated from his wife after she slept with his boss. I suppose I’ll start with the fact that the premise of this novel is really quite good. Where to begin in my review of this disaster of a novel? With the nonstop implausible sex and violence? With the children who speak and act like sitcom children rather than the real thing? With the hackneyed displays of emotion? With the clunky transitions in and out of flashbacks? With the prose that sometimes descends into the sorts of sentences that 10 th graders are asked to fix in grammar workbooks? Choices abound.

This is where i leave you author