Lieb Tropper's cousin Jonathan Tropper releases newest novel, ‘One Last Thing Before I Go'

Oct. 23, 2012 - PRLog -- The latest, “One Last Thing Before I Go,” is just out and hurrying toward the best-seller list.

An interesting thing about Tropper is that Stephen King led him astray. It took Jay McInerney to set him straight.

“In high school, I was reading a lot of Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut and both those writers, they write in very conversational English. It had the effect of tricking me into thinking writing is a very easy thing to do,” says Tropper, who grew up in Riverdale.
And, of course, that’s totally wrong.”

It was while he was at Yeshiva University that he picked up a copy of “Bright Lights, Big City.”

“All the light bulbs went off. It woke up the writer in me. Every book I write, I’m trying to write that book.”

Although it would be hard to confuse any of Tropper’s often absurdly comic novels with maximum cool McInerney’s chronicle of downtown anomie, what Tropper took away from the novel was a compelling need to find his own voice. His happens to win affection for guys allergic to maturity.

“One Last Thing Before I Go” is about a middle-aged suburbanite who had a brief moment as a rock star and now plays wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs. “This Is Where I Leave You” (2010) is a family tale narrated by one of the sons who lost his wife to a Howard Stern-like shock jock.

“Yes, you could say my male characters suffer from arrested development,” agrees Tropper, the author of six books. “That’s a product of society. These days we cling to childish things until they pry them out of our cold, dead hands.”