I feel bad about giving this novel just two stars. I do think that if Mr. Dolnick had been a bit more focused with certain events and had laid the novel out differently that it would have worked better.

This novel is about two friends, Adam and Thomas. Adam is the main protagonist of this novel. We find out that he lives in Washington D.C. and has never really been himself since an incident that involved him and his former best friend, Thomas.

It takes a while for the incident to become known to the reader. When it does, it is shocking and you can see how that one event would shape Adam and Thomas differently.

If the novel had focused on that; this would have been a fantastic story. However, we also deal with Adam and his lack of ability to move on from a former romantic relationship, becoming obsessed with someone, and his refusal to have anything to do with Thomas or his family.

We have the novel discussing Adam's past and present and at times I found myself wishing that we could just focus on one thing at a time since I was getting whiplash from the constant back and forth.

When we move to Adam trying in his view "save Thomas" and all of the events that occurred because of that I completely gave up.

I also mentioned that the layout of the novel did not help matters any and it did not. Due to the novel being told also through emails that are sent to Adam from Thomas's parents and then from Adam to Thomas and others you have no idea in the timeline when things are occurring.

The ending of the novel occurred with a whimper. I think it was meant to make readers think, but all I felt was gratitude that I was finished with the novel.

Please note that I received this novel via The Amazon Vine Program. ( )

There are many metaphors associated with addition, one being “hitting rock bottom.” This phrase allows the addict to cling to a notion of an absolute foundation on which to build a new life. In Ben Dolnick’s novel, two lifelong friends share responsibility for a guilt-ridden teenage event that is At the Bottom of Everything. In spite of their close friendship, each boy looks at a deadly error from a different point of view, a unique rock bottom. The intellectually superior, introspective, and socially aloof Thomas obsesses on the event seeking understanding, direction, and redemption for his life path. The superior social, athletic, and occupational Adam avoids ruminating on his rock bottom experience with Thomas seeking a traditional middle class path of least resistance to the best deal. Rock bottom as a metaphor for addicts as well as Thomas and Adam is relative and loses its power unless the person chooses to accept the implications of it and make conforming decisions based on it.

Are the individual and arbitrary decisions made on the basis of a metaphor helpful, harmful, or irrelevant to life choices? How important is it to develop a unifying philosophical position, a reason/explanation for living when a person forms a lasting perception of complex events using a simple image like, the bottom of everything? The hardest thing in the world for the addict and Thomas and Adam may be to share the personally powerful emotional outcome of a metaphorical description of common experience. The power of this sharing could be the basis for religious acceptance of fate.

Mr. Dolnick includes an epigraph before the title page, a qoute from William James the functionalist psychologist. “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” In his school of psychology, James focused on the affordances of perceptions and behavior. How do they function, what do they afford in the person's life? As Thomas and Adam discover, perceptual and behavioral self-determination is detrimental when the person has reached the bottom of everything. So, how do Thomas and Adam find help? They proceed in very different ways but end up with common insight.

This is a very interesting story narrated by Adam. The restrictions of the first person narrative are removed using an epistolary technique of email communication between characters. This communication is important in Adam’s understanding of the motives of others when he is not observing or speaking to them directly. The technique shortens the story to a large extent in a good way, but may strike the reader as a “hurry up offense” (a football metaphor). I recommend this novel to readers who enjoy a literary focus on limited action but detailed character development and personal resolution of metaphysical dilemmas. ( )

The strongest aspects of this book were the observations the main character made, not on his life or his friend Thomas’s life, but on life in general. Despite his young(ish) age – an ageless wisdom shines through at times that really caught my attention.

“There are certain places, certain objects, that seem in some hard-to-explain way alive, and that gives a weird charmed quality to everything you do in them or with them. When I was little I seemed to get this feeling more regularly; it would come over me when I was holding a glass, or wearing a particular sweater, or sitting in the unpainted corner of the kitchen in one of the first apartments I remember. Warmth? Happiness? Home? What comes to mind is the way wood sometimes looks in sunlight; there’s a Vermeer-ish quality to what I’m talking about.”

Some of the feelings in this story are so universal – and the author does a simply amazing job encapsulating these shared human experiences. This book hinges on one shattering moment – an event that ends the relatively normal and pleasant lives that Adam and Thomas have been living. This moment is described in a snapshot that just haunted me.

“There’s a moment just after breaking something (the glass slips from your fingertips, your elbow catches the vase) in which it feels like if you stand there, absolutely still, baring your teeth, you should be able to suck time backward like an indrawn breath. Your hand hangs there in the air, your eyes fall shut, you’re like someone playing a children’s game with a whistle and a voice that shouts, “Freeze!”

Adam and Thomas go their separate ways, only to come together again in nearly unrecognizable circumstances. Thomas, who has been searching for answers, is then sought out by Adam – who had been trying to deny the past. Only when pushed far past his emotional and physical limits does he realize the impact of their childhood actions.

“I was, of course, incredibly tired, but past a certain point tiredness stops registering primarily as a desire to be asleep. It was as if my body or brain had at some point in the past few days accepted that I was never again going to get adequate sleep, so it had constructed a jittery, pain-spiked simulation of wakefulness.”

Even then, Adam is able to recover some sense of a normal life – but not one that is unaffected by all he has experienced.

“There’s a tendency, I think, to discount the suffering in fear; after the fact, once the tests have come back negative or the call’s been returned, we think, It wasn’t as bad as all that. We let our present relief retouch our past terror.”

One brief moment, one action followed by inaction changed everything. Changed the lives of so many people – and effectively ended the lives of others.

This was a powerful story, but in different ways than I had expected. ( )

completed 8.5.14, 3 stars ( )