Plan B: A Novel - Softcover

Tropper, Jonathan

3.67

8,268 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312272766 ISBN 13: 9780312272760

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001

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Turning thirty was never supposed to be like this. Ten years ago, Ben, Lindsey, Chuck, Alison, and Jack graduated from New York University and went out into the world, fresh-faced and full of dreams for the future. But now Ben's getting a divorce; Lindsey's unemployed; Alison and Chuck seem stuck in ruts of their own making; and Jack is getting more publicity for his cocaine addiction than his multimillion-dollar Hollywood successes.

Suddenly, turning thirty-- past the age their parents were when they were born, older than every current star athlete or pop music sensation-- seems to be both more meaningful and less than they'd imagined ten years ago.

Jonathan Tropper's wonderful debut novel is about more than friendship, love, celebrity, addiction, kidnapping, or even turning thirty-- it's a heartfelt comic riff on what it means to be an adult against your will, to be single when you thought you'd have a family, to discover you are not, in fact, immortal, and to learn that Star Wars is as good a life lesson today as it was when you were six years old.

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About the Author:

Jonathan Tropper earned a graduate degree in writing at New York University and now lives in Westchester, New York.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A lightweight first novel explores the sea change that turning 30 brings in the lives of a group of Manhattan friends whove known one another since college. Narrator Ben, a would-be writer, works at Esquire writing lists instead of articles. Recently divorced from a wife he married on the rebound, he still loves his old girlfriend, Lindsey, a former teacher now doing temp work while she finds herself. Chuck, a resident at Mount Sinai, was a fat teenager but is now a womanizer. Allison is a lawyer in a high-powered firm, though her life really revolves around Jack, the one who left New York to become a movie star and happens to have a cocaine addiction. The story centers around the group's plan to cure Jack by whisking him away to Allison's familys vacation place upstate. Naturally, the plan goes awry, since these people seem remarkably naive about drugs and the law. And for all the concern they show in spiriting Jack away, once he really has disappeared and could be at life-threatening risk, theyre all too wrapped up in their own soul-searching or romance rekindling to show much real distress. While Tropper clearly has a grasp on the pop culture he describes, he has a habit of comparing his characters' situations to other fictions, from Star Wars to Three's Company to the novels of Jay McInerney, which only emphasizes the pop-hodgepodge nature of his own writing. The characters, for all their angst and clever dialogue, are essentially flat, and the predictable denouement is no help. Reads like a fictionalization of TVs Friends, but more earnest. -- Copyright �2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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