Two Guys from Verona

By James Kaplan

"Two Guys from Verona" is not, as one might expect from the title, a slacker or Ebonics translation of Shakespeare's "Two Gentlemen from Verona." Instead, it is the story of two old High School pals from Verona, New Jersey dealing with life on the eve of their 25th high school reunion and the eve of the new millennium.

Set in 1999, the novel's unusual choice of an almost science fiction setting is presumably meant to coincide with the way time has rushed by the novel's two aging protagonists, Will Weiss and Joel Gold. Instead, it mainly serves to distract the reader from the plot with toned-down versions of the mild neo-futuristic satires such as "Back to the Future II" and Conan O'Brien's "In the Year 2000 sketches," while offering little that contributes to the story itself.

The upscale New Jersey setting of the Two Guys is not light years apart from the upscale Connecticut setting of the recent movie "The Ice Storm," and its narrative depicting the onrush of the future upsetting the comfortable world of the dreamers and the doers follows much of the same plot as well. However, this novel differs: not in its sentimental hipness or its direct visual language (although both help this novel stand out from the slowly-growing pack of similarly themed Baby Boomer elegies), but rather in its commitment to memory that is as powerful and as meaningful as that of "Slaves in the Family."

From Will's bourgeois anxieties to Joel's counter-social existence, they are united not only by a common past, but also by a common anxiety of the future. Their existence, which contrasts in Will's collapsing marriage and incoming mid-life crisis and Joel's unreal anti-social existence, only serves to heighten the forces of memory and change which present them with the human choice that we must make. As a species which has developed a history, a progression of events whose forwards motion only contrasts with cyclical natural events, must either accept change through adaptation or reject it through madness.

The choice between the acceptance of what is and what is to come and the rejection of it in the gathered pools of memory and mid-life crisis is the focal point of this novel. The final compromises are made resonate with us as readers, through the vividly drawn characters, and as human being, watching time go by.