This Is Where I Leave You

“In the days that followed, I would review the last year or so of our marriage like the security tapes after a robbery, wondering how the hell I could have been so damn oblivious, how it took actually walking in on them to finally get the picture.”

Characteristic of Judd’s voice, this passage displays his hurt and fury over the discovery that his wife was having an affair. The analogy of a robbery suggests how he feels Wade has robbed him of Jen’s affection. Judd is also furious with himself for not realizing something was wrong, and this anger proves a habitual defense mechanism for his character.

“At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.”

As he returns to his childhood home and confronts his relationships with his family members, Judd gains a new perspective on his parents and their relationships with him as well as with each other. Part of his character arc will involve coming to recognize his parents as people with rich lives and histories, and not just sources of disappointment and resentment for him.

“It’s going to be crowded, and uncomfortable, and we’ll all get on each other’s nerves, but for the next seven days, you are all my children again.”

Their mother’s insistence that they honor their father’s wish is the plot device that commits the characters to the rest of the book’s action. Hillary’s wish for emotional connection with her children echoes one of the novel’s major themes. This passage also foreshadows the later discovery that sitting shiva was Hillary’s request, not Mort’s.

“And now I have no wife, no child, no job, no home, or anything else that would point to a life being lived with any success. I may not be old, but I’m too old to have this much of nothing.”

Judd’s anxiety over what he has lost and his sense of failure are significant parts of his internal conflict. He measures himself against the family, friends, and acquaintances who visit while the family sits shiva and is ashamed to find himself not measuring up. This passage captures Judd’s wry, ironic, and generally pessimistic voice.

“Wouldn’t it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there’s a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children’s light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it’s my own.”

Dreams are a motif throughout the novel as Judd’s sleeping dreams address his fears and anxieties and his waking fantasies express his longing to connect, attach, and be loved. The first time he wakes from a nightmare, Judd entertains this wishful thought that the depressing current state of his life is another level of nightmare from which he will awaken.

“We are thinking about our kids, our lack of kids, about finances and fiancées and soon-to-be ex-wives, about the sex we’re not having, about the sex our soon-to-be ex-wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.”

Judd finds that sitting shiva fails to soothe or condole him but instead gives him time to contemplate his losses and inadequacies. This passage captures several of the things that are troubling him, generating internal conflict, while the fog is a metaphor for Judd’s emotional state, in which he is currently unable to anticipate his future.

“Time and troubles have sharpened her softer edges, and now her face is a knife, her breasts like two clenched fists under her blouse. She’s a sexy street-fight of a woman.”

Returning home confronts Judd with the loves and disappointments of his youth and childhood. Judd notes how Penny, like many of his other acquaintances, has changed with age. While he is still drawn to her, he feels that attraction is dangerous, suggested by imagery that conveys sharpness. Penny is a foil to Jen, who has a nice home and car and now Wade, all of which Judd provided for her, while Penny lives alone and disappointed in a small apartment, holding down a dead-end job. Penny also reminds Judd of his fears at being stuck in the basement, losing any hope for freedom and independence.

“I also feel an unbidden rush of excitement at her arrival, wondering at the speed of light if this somehow means we’ll be getting back together. In that instance, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched; the pregnancy was a false alarm, she’ll stay for the shiva, we’ll have some hard talks. I’ll yell and she’ll cry, but she’ll still bunk with me on that pitiful sofa bed in the basement. And when the shiva is over, we’ll go home and start again. I won’t even go back for my stuff at the Lees’, just bequeath it to the next desperate tenant. I’ll start fresh, all new things.”

When Jen shows up at his childhood home to offer her condolences, Judd engages in another split-second fantasy that shows his longing to reconcile with her and start fresh. He’s stuck in the basement, literally and metaphorically, and longs for escape. His desire to reconnect with Jen is part of Judd’s wish for love, one of his chief character motivations, just as his tendency toward fantasy offers an imaginative escape from the pain of loss.

“Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are.”

While the narrative is mostly written from the first-person perspective, told from Judd’s point of view, occasionally the narrative slips into second person, addressing the reader as “you” or, as Judd reflects here on something he believes is human nature, a “we” that brings the reader in collusion.

“Our marriage had unwittingly become fused to that little ball of life growing in her belly, and when it died, so did we.”

As Judd tries to trace the breakdown of his marriage, he finally realizes that the loss of their child was a turning point in his and Jen’s relationship. This realization is likewise an emotional turning point that prepares Judd to consider forgiving her for her betrayal.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the night we broke, and in the years to follow, the jagged pieces of us would continue to drift further and further apart, small vital bits getting lost here and there, until there was no hope of ever putting us back together.”

Just as he points to the stillbirth of their child as a moment that fractured his marriage, Judd perceives the night the rottweiler attacked Paul as the moment Judd lost his place in the family. Judd feels guilty because the attack occurred when Paul confronted a bully in Judd’s defense, and the resulting injury changed the course of Paul’s life, too. The broken imagery conveys the layers of grief and bereavement, one of the novel’s major themes.

“I’m mourning my father and having sex with my sister-in-law and falling in love with strangers on the way to see the wife who slept with my boss and is now simultaneously divorcing me and having my baby. I feel like the driver who spends that extra second fussing with his cell phone and looks up just in time to see the front of his car crash through the guardrail and drive off the cliff.”

This passage captures Judd’s ironic voice as he reflects on the many complications confronting him. The image he uses, however, depicts him as a driver who is in some way responsible for the accident that befalls him, suggesting Judd feels guilt as well as anger for his circumstances.

“I am not ready to be a father. I have nothing to offer: no wisdom, no expertise, no home, no job, no wife. […] What I’ve got is a big bag of nothing, and no kid will respect a father like that. This was my chance to start over, to find someone who would defy the odds and love me, to figure out the rest of my life. Now any chance of a clean break is gone.”

Judd’s anger and resentment over Jen’s pregnancy lead to one of the lowest points in his character arc. Not only does he feel he has nothing, but he also feels trapped in these circumstances. The “big bag of nothing” is characteristic of Tropper’s use of imagery and Judd’s voice.

“It’s a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are. Friendship in the suburbs is wife-driven, and my friends were essentially those husbands of Jen’s friends that I could most tolerate. Now that I’d been sidelined, Wade had stepped in for me like an understudy, a small note was inserted into the program, and the show went on without missing a beat.”

The image of a show that continues in its major action while characters are swapped expresses Judd’s sense of displacement. Seeing Jen move on with the same structure to her life, only now with Wade, exacerbates his fears of being unloved.

“We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars.”

After a day where he feels very distant from his family, the photograph Phillip finds that shows the three Foxman brothers, with their father reflected in the picture, reminds Judd of happy times, even though he realizes that picture captured a time, a dynamic, and an innocence that cannot be retrieved given later events and wounds. Photographs often appear in the novel holding memories of earlier, innocent joys that Judd can still feel.

“Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her from us while there’s still time.”

Tracy, as an outsider meeting the family, provides a foil and contrast to the Foxman family dynamics, particularly in the way she can express emotion and insist on calm. Tracy’s relationship with Phillip is one of the several relationships that offer a foil and contrast to Judd and Jen, a comment on the novel’s themes of sex and romantic love. The predatory image of the shark helps express Tracy’s character as being mature and self-contained. Judd’s habit of sitting on the roof to observe in the mornings becomes symbolic of his growing ability to reflect on and come to terms with his present circumstances and his past.

“The women are more of a mixed bag. Some of them have managed to hold it together, but on others, skin hangs loosely off the bone, crinkled like cellophane; ankles disappear beneath mounds of flesh; and spider veins stretch out like bruises just below the skin. There really should be a dress code.”

This passage captures Judd’s voice and characteristic imagery and also displays his fear of aging. Judd closely observes the bodies and manner of the visitors to shiva, and his reactions are primarily sexual attraction or disgust. Judd’s inability to see far past the superficial might account for the inability to feel he truly connects with anyone around him as well as his fears of ending up unloved and alone.

“Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.”

The irony of this moment, when Judd contemplates whether he could be happy with Penny, who is beautiful if not smoldering like Jen, is heightened by the next scene beat, when Jen calls to inform Judd that she fears for the baby she carries. Jen’s distress informs Judd about which woman he really prefers and suggests to him that Penny was just another fantasy.

“I realize now that this is how it will be: Wade on the inside, and me out here in the rain, and no magical heartbeat can change that. I will always be the odd man out, the guy everyone secretly hopes won’t show up to the party […] And right now, that seems like more injustice than any man should rightfully be asked to swallow.”

The moment Judd is kicked out of the hospital after arguing with Wade offers a new low for Judd’s character arc. Judd is beginning to acknowledge his anger and, instead of repressing it, chooses to express it by vandalizing Wade’s car as a stand-in for Wade himself.

“I am dealing with major life issues here, death, divorce, fatherhood, and yet here, in this bar, I am all cock. I don’t know why this is, what makes it so, but I’d be lying if I said otherwise.”

Judd’s interest in who will have sex with him is a prevalent trait throughout the book, speaking to the themes of sex and attraction. This urge toward sex or eros can, in terms of Freudian psychology, be explained by the human need to reaffirm life in the face of death, grief, and the confrontation with one’s own mortality that bereavement can inspire.

“Horry’s got the kind of abs you want, the kind that ripple and flex effortlessly under his skin. Looking at him, you can’t help but be reminded of who he used to be, who he should be now. We all start out so damn sure, thinking we’ve got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we’d never leave our bedrooms.”

The character of Horry offers a foil to Judd, and not just in physique. Horry’s continued attachment to Wendy mirrors Judd’s attachment to Jen, but Horry also represents what Judd fears: being stuck in Elmsbrook, having his choices limited, or being permanently injured by a sudden accident, as happened to Horry and Paul. The narration slips into second person again as Judd turns philosophical about human nature.

“When I was a kid, I would flex my eyeballs to make everything go blurry. If I can just do that with my brain for a little while, flex until certain thoughts become blurred, this can be my life again.”

When Judd goes to console Jen after Wade broke up with her, he considers that he might finally be waking up from his nightmare. He feels a sense of belonging at being back in their house and their bed, with Jen, and considers another imaginative way that he can reclaim what he feels he lost. This imaginative escape is one strategy among several the novel offers as ways to cope with loss and grief.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the four of you to stay in the same place for more than a few hours? My husband, your father, had died. I needed you. And you needed each other, even if you still don’t know it.”

In a surprise twist at the end, Judd guesses that his mother, rather than Mort, requested that the family sit shiva, which Hillary confirms. Hillary, a psychologist, sees the ritual as a way the siblings could repair their relationships and she could have the comfort of her children’s presence. This also provides the plot device that brings the characters together and propels the action.