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Summary: Pop culture under the microscope
Review: Flat out, this is a fun read. The timing for this book's release is nearly perfect, as 80's pop culture has just recently found a retro resurgence. But unlike nearly every other book you read that examines pop culture, this book has a sincere, unpretentious heart. The narrator, Ben, is a likeable Everyman who can't quite get over the urge to keep living in the 80's. The theme, however, of this book takes a serious examination of our growing fascination with celebrity. Toward the beginning, one of the characters, Lindsey, says, "Our generation is the first for whom pop culture is our sole frame of reference." Real life experience is compared and validated by the world of television and film. Paralleling this theme is a plot that concerns four friends exercising their concern for a fifth friend who is an international film star--a veritable icon of pop culture. A fine debut, by all respects. I look forward to more work from Tropper.
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Summary: A Wonderful Surprise. This Book Has It All!
Review: Plan B is one of those rare books that is funny enough to make you laugh, repeatedly, while still engaging you to the point that you genuinely care about the characters. Ben, the narrator, touchingly conveys the pain and uncertainty of turning thirty with so many dreams still unfulfilled as of yet, and the growing suspicion that the plans you made when you were just starting out might never actually work out. Lately, there have been all of these books that deal with women and their neuroses, like Bridget Jones and The Girls Guide To Hunting and Fishing. It was refreshing to see a male narrator's take on the trials and tribulations of love and adulthood. A riveting storyline, with plenty of romance and wit to boot, Plan B is an unbelievably well written debut and I highly recommend it.
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Summary: Pure, Unpretentious Pleasure!
Review: This book was just fun, there's no way around it! After reading one pretentious author after another, it was so relaxing to just read a good story with wit, style and an author who clearly doesn't take himself too seriously to have fun. The five friends at the center of the story seemed to have been pulled right out of my own crowd, except in Tropper's hands they were both slightly more pathetic and way funnier. I turned thirty a few years ago, and this book is dead on in its portrayal of how ambiguously disturbing that birthday is. Ben, the narrator, is honest and funny without having to resort to the obnoxious irony so many "gen x' writers feel is their birthright. Clearly, this book has "movie" written all over it, something with Ben Stiller and Matt Damon or someone like that, but that in no way makes it a less worthwhile book. BOTTOM LINE: If you want a light, enjoyable read that will touch you as well as make you laugh out loud, you MUST buy this book. It will not disappoint! And all the eighties pop culture references are a bonus, too.
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Summary: The WB version of literature
Review: Having just turned 30 myself, I was drawn to this book with the hope that it would capture that creepy life equation: age + responsibility - college = adulthood. What I found was a book that tries a little too hard to sound hip, fills up on characters that play like Aaron Spelling-ized versions of real people and a plot that has a gaping hole where logic should be. IT'S MY LATEST GUILTY PLEASURE! I devoured it in a few hours, cast each role in the movie by the second chapter, and urged several friends to sell their organs on e-Bay if they didn't have enough cash to get their own copy. If you can get past the idea that five friends from NYU are a) still in touch, b) all wildly successful in their fields, and c) that those fields include doctor, actor, writer, lawyer, then navigating the botched intervention for the bad-boy movie star during a weekend in the country should be no problem. I'm sure James Van Der Beek or one of those girls from "Popular" will be optioning the rights to this---it was obviously written to be adapted. But that's ok---it's head candy. You want real fiction? Go pick up a celebrity biography.
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Summary: A First-Rate Effort
Review: I don't even begin to fit intothis book's demographic, butI'm delighted that I got toread an advance copy.Tropper has created a groupof memorable,multi-dimensional characters, and produced a real page-turner.
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Summary: Book Description
Review: Turning thirty was never supposed to be like this. Ten years ago, Ben, Lindsey, Chuck, Alison, and Jack graduated from NYU 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. It seems that the one thing they've learned in the last ten years is that nothing turned out the way they'd planned it. 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. There's no time to contemplate this "milestone," however; life is intervening. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and though the bold plan the friends devise to save Jack from himself may not be the best way, once again, going with plan B seems to be the only choice they have. Jonathan Tropper's wonderful debut novel is about more than friendship, love, celebrity, addiction, kidnapping, or even turning thirty--it's a heartfelt, sharply written, 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 realize nothing in life happens like you planned it, 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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Summary: A Fresh New Voice!
Review: The rapid-fire dialogue and witty narration alone make this book a worthwhile read. Add to that the fun story-line involving the kidnapping of a movie star and hiding him in small-town USA, five old college chums shacking up to detox their addicted friend, entanglements with the locals and the local police dept., and you have a comical, gripping novel that you can't put down. I was impressed with the witty, yet simple narration, and enjoyed the pop culture references, being only slightly older than the characters involved. This is the type of books that critics generally turn their noses up at for being too mainstream, but it is wonderfully entertaining, and should find a large audience. I look forward to Mr. Troper's future novels.
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Summary: Beg to differ
Review: You know, I'm almost 30 myself and I thought this book was totally off base. Trite, contrived, artificial and glib. A bad Jay McInerney knockoff. The plot was fun and the dialogue was fast-paced (filled with scripted witticisms and one-liners), but I didn't believe in the 2-dimensional characters for a second. And the pop culture references were just tiring. I mean, what 30 year old takes abiding life lessons from Star Wars? This book was all surface and no substance. Entertaining, but entirely hollow. Tropper's a talented storyteller and I'd pay ten bucks to see this as a movie, but as literature? I wouldn't pay a dime.
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Summary: A SPLENDID BEGINNING
Review: There are many fine novice writers and Jonathan Tropper, author of PLAN B, is exceptional among them. This book not only bursts with the talent and exuberance we expect in a successful first novel, it displays a confidence in the handling of material and a maturity of thought uncommon in many experienced authors. Even jaded readers loathe to explore another new novelist will be excited by this work. Morris Saperstein, JERUSALEM REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Summary: Our generation's brat pack!
Review: A lot of reviews of have mentioned how much this book talks aboutpop culture...some see it as a positive and others as a negative. I was drawn to this book for two reasons. 1) The cover says "Thirty ..." (which is funny) 2)The back of the book which speaks of, well, all the pop culture references. I'm sucker for that stuff I guess. Everything from Three's Company to Billy Joel (whose lyrics play a role--a first in a novel I've seen)is in there. The more astute among you may find parts formulaic. Yet, that really didn't bother me. Look at what sells in this genre of fiction today--all these books about plucky single ladies from London. If you are touched by a book, isn't that all that matters? Tropper gets the details right. I'm closing in on 30 and share many of the feelings as our narrator, Ben. Trouble letting go of the past, fear of the future, etc. The music of 1980s, Star Wars, Seinfeld...these things were part of our lives and Tropper doesn't put them in to be cute. He puts them in because people actually look at life through the prism of these things. Tropper mentions an idea that I had discussed with my own friends (isn't it cool when you see your ideas validated by a good writer?)--the idea that Gen X is unified by it's pop culture. Many of us were. I cared deeply about these characters and found myself reading 200 pages in one day just to see what happened. The plot, as Booklist says, is a bit like The Big Chill. And the Jack-Alison relationship bears an uncanny resemblance to the Rob Lowe-Mare Winningham relationship in St. Elmo's Fire. Except that the Alison character is far more appealing than the Mare Winnigham character (and Jack more appealing than Rob Lowe--in anything). Some of the events in the book do fit together a bit too perfectly, but it is fiction. And in the big picture, it was a book that gets it right. In fact, Tropper writes a great first novel. Now, why I can't meet a Lindsey?
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