Ron Currie Jr, Everything Matters! ** 1/2

Even before Junior Thibodeau is born, he knows that the world is going to come to an end when he is 36 years old, when a comet smashes into Earth. How can he deal with this knowledge? Can he find meaning in his life?

The book got off to a strong start, with an eye for quirky detail and solid character development. However, it wasn't long before wild plot developments overwhelmed the basic realism. Every carefully delineated character underwent an event that transformed him or her into a completely different, more programmatic, person. Junior's brother becomes the best baseball player in the major leagues; Junior becomes the fourth smartest person in the world, who manages to create a world-saving device and cure cancer. I was much more interested in the real family at the start of the book  than the cartoons in the later parts. I'd rather know how a regular person would deal with the awful foreknowledge of impending doom.

The reviews quoted on the cover mention Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as Currie's obvious models. That's definitely the company Currie wants to keep, but Everything Matters! is not as comic as Vonnegut nor as insightful as DFW, and the "final triumph that reconfigures the universe" is kinda lame.