Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia

It's the fall of 1999 in the plush New Jersey suburbs, and Will and Joel are fortyish, friends since the second grade. Will is a successful, tired cardboard salesman with a mortgage, a pretty wife, and 2.2 kids. Joel lives with his mother and works at a sub shop. Joel's favorite pastime is cruising the dark streets in his rusted-out '74 Chevy, drinking whiskey from a brown paper bag. Will feels sorry for Joel. And Joel feels sorry for Will. But their twenty-fifth high school reunion will change both their lives in ways neither has dreamed of -- one facing death, the other facing life for the first time.

Written in lucid, trenchantly funny prose, Two Guys from Verona strips bare the cultural and moral universe of a suburb in our strange era.