Ron Currie's 2009 novel Everything Matters! blew me away -- it's a story about a kid who knows the exact moment he's going to die. I was so amazed how Currie made that conceit work through a full, satisfying, and really smart read.
When I sat down to write a review of Currie's new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, for the Chicago Review of Books, I first went back to my reading journal to remind myself about some of the details of why I'd loved Everything Matters!. That idea of killing a character or foreshadowing a character's death, but keeping a reader engaged was front and center in what I'd written when I'd read it 15 years ago. So that felt like a natural entry point to the review, since Currie basically does that again here!
But it didn't all go smoothly. I wrote two drafts of the review in which I called the idea of killing your character in the title the "Titanic Trick," a not to how we all sat through that three-hour movie even though we knew the boat was going to sink and Jack was going to die. I couldn't make it work through the whole review, though. Turns out it was too cute by half, and I was struggling with the piece for a solid week before just deciding to kill that darling and start over. Within an hour, I had the whole thing nearly done -- same idea, just not calling it something stupid. Lesson learned. Killing your darlings is important.
And so, kudos to Currie for making the "Titanic Trick" (haha, resurrected darling!) work not once, but twice in Babs Dionne. It's a truly fantastic novel -- a favorite of 2025 so far for sure. I hope you'll take a second to check out my CHIRB review here:
I've loved everything Currie's written -- he's a writer who just makes sense to me. My brain absorbs his sentences quickly and with very little friction. Some writers you just connect with. He's one for me, and I couldn't have been more excited that he was back after eight years with this novel.
Definitely check out his other novels, if you haven't read him. After Everything Matters!, 2013's Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (the best all-time novel that refers to a nicotine patch in the title) reads like autofiction but isn't (or is it?), and 2017's The One-Eyed Man, a novel about very troubled times, is likely as relevant today as it was then. (His 2007 debut God Is Dead I realized as I'm writing this I haven't actually read yet. I'll need to fix that soon.)
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