Everything Matters! - 9780670020928

You alone know that the world will end thirty-six years after your birth. Do you succumb to nihilistic apathy? Use your singular knowledge to save mankind? To what end do you live your life?
While still in his mother's womb, Junior Thibodeau is encoded with a prophecy: in thirty-six years a comet will obliterate life on Earth. Born to a working-class family in rural Maine, he comes of age in the shabby-decadent eighties, a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine, all the while grappling with one question: Does anything I do matter? While Junior searches for meaning in a world only he knows is doomed, the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices - from sibling rivalry over the cable box to first love in grade school; from crazed misadventures in Chicago to an all-out attempt to cheat death itself. Junior's loved ones, too, reckon with lives that cast his existential crisis into sharp relief: his anxious mother; his older brother, a child cocaine addict turned pro-baseball savant; his exalted father, whose mortal illness summons the best and worst in his sons; and Amy, the love of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that might save humanity.
As our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from the planet, Junior's final triumph ushers in something else altogether - an astonishing outcome that reconfigures everything we thought we knew about his universe, as well as our own.
A coming-of-age tale, a love story, and a marvelous family drama, Everything Matters! drives to the human heart of these characters, and the indelible voices who narrate this American tour de force leave the reader exhilarated.