Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia - Softcover

James Kaplan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330393073 ISBN 13: 9780330393072

Publisher: Pan Books, 2000

Synopsis

Will and Joel are two forty-three-year-olds in a New Jersey suburb on the verge of the millennium. Will is a married, middle-class soul in torment; Joel is a closet genius who sees the world as nobody else does. Will pities Joel; Joel pities Will. Then their twenty-fifth high school reunion changes everything.
Two Guys from Verona is a mystery, but not in the conventional sense. Against the backdrop of an unraveling marriage, of romance old and new, and of a community losing its center, Will and Joel plumb the enigmas of sex, love, friendship, and time itself. As the world moves into the inconceivable realm of the 2000s, each man's life takes a turn into a world he never could have imagined.

About this title

From the Back Cover

It's the fall of 1999 in the plush New Jersey suburbs, and Will and Joel are fortyish, friends since the second grade. Will is a successful, tired cardboard salesman with a mortgage, a pretty wife, and 2.2 kids. Joel lives with his mother and works at a sub shop. Will feels sorry for Joel. And Joel feels sorry for Will. But their twenty-fifth high school reunion will change both their lives in ways neither has dreamed of-one facing death, the other facing life for the first time.

Written in lucid, trenchantly funny prose, Two Guys from Verona strips bare the cultural and moral universe of a suburb in our strange era.

"A bittersweet elegy for what, not too long ago, looked like a spanking new American version of the promised land."-The New York Times Book Review

"Two Guys from Verona may well emerge as The Great American Novel, or at any rate the great one at the turn of the millennium."-San Antonio Express News

"Kaplan's novel is a view of suburban life as David Lynch might imagine it: as banal as a mini-mall, yet seething with anxiety, eroticism and violence. Novels don't come any hipper than that."-The Baltimore Sun

"Like John Updike, James Kaplan knows the suburban doldrums of domestic tedium and the elaborate power games that pass for congenial male bonding in those towns."-The New York Observer

"Kaplan's marvelously supple and understated style . . . is the perfect vehicle for the suspense that charges this witty, sexy, and wise comedyof errors and correction."-Booklist (starred review)

James Kaplan sold his first short story to The New Yorker at twenty-three; he has been writing fiction, screenplays, and articles for over two decades. He is a contributing editor for New York magazine and TV Guide and a contributing writer for Premiere. He is also the author of the novel, Pearl's Progress.

About the Author

James Kaplan is a contributing editor for New York magazine and TV Guide , a contributing writer for Premiere, and the author of two previous books: the novel Pearl's Progress, and The Airport, a nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport. He lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons .

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0330393073
• ISBN 13: 9780330393072
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400