These Things Happen Paperback – April 15, 2014

Kramer has had a career as a television writer (my beloved Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, so he knows how to deliver bits of character without a ridiculous amount of description. We either hear what the characters are actually saying (dialogue) or we hear what the characters are thinking, as if Meredith Grey were narrating at the the start and end of a weekly episode of TV. There are no four-page descriptions of flowers or rooms or street views. Thank goodness.This has the advantage of giving us a greater sense of the characters from their first appearances, but also a realization that we're getting unreliable narrators. Without an omniscient third-person narration, we never really know whether more about anyone than what they thinking of themselves or what others think of them is at play. This works well for characters who need not have a lot of depth -- because of their peripheral role to the plot -- but it leaves us wanting to know more about these characters.These Things Happen -- well, the *thing* that happens -- is ugly, and normally would have been expected in a piece of darker literature, except we're led to believe that something like that won't happen in this kind of story because we're past all that -- and then it happens, making it all the more shocking. And then the things that happen spin off from that thing -- self-revelations, relationship discussions, poor behavior from people who should know better.It all happens over the course of three days: the day before, the day, and then the day after. Over time, we get to hear from the two people I see as the real protagonists, Wesley (the son of divorced parents, Kenny and Lola), and George, Kenny's boyfriend. George and Wesley, you realize, are magnificent people. Flawed, of course, as we all are, and George's self-esteem issues might have been more annoying in a longer book focused on him. (He's like that wonderful friend you have who just never realizes how wonderful he or she is.) But Wesley, who is entirely cool with George, and George, who seems to try to be invisible except when he's running his restaurant, is a better "parent" than either Lola or Kenny. Indeed, I suspect it's quite intentional that the two step-parental roles are the most appealing adults in the story.We only get a small bit of insight into Lola; if this were TV, it would be near the end of the first season before we'd get this kind of thing, and we'd have slightly more compassion because we'd have had a chance to see her good points. But all it takes is a taste of Ben, Lola's older, doctor husband to realize we are charmed. We get vignettes of a few random people, who give us insight (mainly into George), and we get just one chapter through the eyes of Theo, who is practically Wesley's story's raison d'être, but without Theo's chapter as a tentpole, there would be no actual action.The only problem I have with the book is Kenny. He's Lola's ex. Wesley's father. George's lover. Attorney and spokesman and man of the year. And yet, at the end of the book, he's a mystery to me. Kramer's too talented a writer to not have done this intentionally, and yet, I don't know whether to be annoyed at Kenny or if there's more to him that I am missing. If it were a TV show, the success or failure of Kenny as a character would rise or fall on the merits of the casting director's skills.Two weeks after having read the book, I still think of Wesley and Theo as my friends' kids. I'd have adored them when they were little and now I'm steering clear, cautious to not be the uncool adult posting nerdy things on their Facebook pages. But I'd gladly go to brunch with Ben (especially if Lola were called away for a work thing) and I want George to be one of my best friends. This is the biggest compliment I can give a book -- that I still want to hang with the characters once the book has ended. I want to know more.Note, I've actually told you nothing about the plot? Like my favorite books and TV shows, this is NOT about the plot. It's all about characters, and what little plot there is exists solely to help us get to know the characters.Like action and thrills? This isn't your book. Like getting inside the skin of characters and hearing the way they talk and think and relate? Like laughing (which I did, aloud, on the two airplane rides that got me from the East Coast to LA, during which I read this), then this is your book.Funny, interesting, and not bogged down in plot but textured (if not robust) in character -- this book is like three days of your acquaintances' real life, that you hear about after the fact and it makes you want to know more.

Richard Kramer wrote this first novel, according to its jacket blurb, years after his first short story appeared in THE NEW YORKER. The wait was well worth it. This is one of those novels that you gush over in spite of your best intentions. It is in a word-- wonderful, the kind after racing through it, that you call up those you love and insist that they read it immediately-- but not your copy.Set in New York and told from the viewpoints of several characters, the novel is about as contemporary as its gets. President Obama is in the White House and the New York legislature has just voted to allow same-sex marriage. And, yes, we have a nontraditional family. Wesley, the young fifteen-year-old, has two families: or one mother, a stepfather, a father and his father's partner. (One of my favorite funny sections of many, even though this novel is ultimately as serious as gay bashing, is Wesley telling his dad Kenny that he and his partner George are boring because he knows a kid whose "'dad was like a lawyer, then he became a woman and decided he hated being a lawyer. Now he's doing nails. And this other boy, Max Bloom? He lives with his mom, and his mom's girlfriend, and his mom's girlfriend's girlfriend.`'') And the plot is not complicated, but what Mr. Kramer does with it is simply not to be believed. Wesley asks his father Kenny and his partner George two questions. In about 250 beautifully-written and love-filled pages, we finally get answers from both men. Kenny's is predictable; George's will blow your head off.Mr. Kramer is a master of dialogue-- the book practically reads itself-- but more importantly he makes profound statements about families (of all kinds) and relationships and raising teenagers and being a teenager and being gay and not being gay. The list seems endless. The scene in the restaurant when George, Kenny, Lola, Kenny's ex-wife and Wesley's mother, Ben, Lola's husband and Wesley meet is almost too painful to read-- it is way too much like the way life is.Edmund White has said that fiction should be a gift to the reader. Richard Ford says that good fiction makes you weep. Christopher Isherwood would say that it is possible to present art and entertainment in the same moment. This really-difficult-to-describe novel meets all these requirements. It has all the light-heartedness, with all its references to the theatre and gourmet food, of Armistead Maupin's TALES OF THE CITY series-- George once played Tom in THE GLASS MENAGERIE but now owns and manages a restaurant with his best friend Lenny-- and the high seriousness of Isherwood's A SINGLE MAN. Finally no novel has made me weep so since I read another fine New York novel, Allan Gurganus's PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS.Mr. Kramer writes in his "Acknowledgments" page the advice given to him was that "what you write should have the intimacy of a letter to a small circle of friends, people to whom you never have to apologize, or explain yourself." To expand on a line from Emily Dickinson-- that takes supreme arrogance on my part-- THESE THINGS HAPPEN is Mr. Kramer's "love" letter to the world. Surely it will be received with gratitude.

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I tore through it over the course of about a day. The story is beautifully written and alternates through the points-of-view of each of the main characters, as well as a couple secondary characters; each of which are charming and genuine. A thoroughly enjoyable read, one that I would recommend to anybody looking for a feel-good story with substance. It truly sits amid the top 5 books I've read this year, and I read at least a book a week!