Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Everything Matters!  By  cover art

Everything Matters!

By: Ron Currie Jr.
Narrated by: Abby Craden, Hillary Huber, Mark Deakins, Lincoln Hoppe, Arthur Morey, Doug Wert
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.25

Buy for $20.25

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Editorial reviews

Everything Matters! tidily places Ron Currie, Jr. among the most talented and creative new American novelists. In his first novel since the story collection God Is Dead, Currie reveals a style not unlike Vonnegut dry, but deadly funny, irreverent, and wholly meaningful. The storytelling is delicately but deliberately choppy, filled with impending dread and lingering hope. In utero, Junior Thibodeaux learns of a catastrophic, world-ending event some 30 years in his future. A voice explains the inevitability of the event, and Junior is born with the crippling knowledge of the impending doom he and everyone he'll grow to love will face. The voice is never explained it could be a group of all-knowing beings (the voice refers to "we") or it could be the author himself, but it remains ever-present in Junior's life.

This mysterious voice reveals important and otherwise unknowable details about the world to Junior, and becomes an established character, however vague and unknowable. Spoken with authority by Mark Deakins, the voice can be likened to that of a gently persistent psychiatrist. It reveals almost no opinion about Junior's choices. In neutral tones, Deakins lends the voice a feeling of all-knowing and all-seeing non-participation it does not step in to prevent or spark any decision by Junior. At the same time, the soft, steady narration includes subtleties of inflection that color the listener's perception. When Junior partakes in some dangerous activity, Deakins sounds almost imperceptibly disappointed and even a little concerned. This act of subtlety injects compassion and calm to what could have been a very cold, omnipresent voice.

Throughout the timeline of the novel, Currie pops in and out of the first person narratives of Junior, his parents, his girlfriend, and his brother, performed by several talented actors. These include Lincoln Hoppe (Junior), Hillary Huber (Junior's girlfriend Amy), Abby Craden (Junior's mother), Arthur Morey (Junior's father), and Doug Wert (Junior's brother Ron). Each narrator brings a unique voice perfectly matched to Currie's nonchalant, matter-of-fact tone. Hoppe deserves additional praise for exercising vocal restraint as the main character. Junior goes through a heck of a lot and is saddled with the emotional baggage of knowing the fate of the world, but Hoppe never lays it on thick in his narration. Instead he gives Junior a mentally exhausted, resigned tone that matches Currie's earlier description of Junior as a "serious child". Hoppe especially shines when the emotional weight of losing his girlfriend and his family start to wear Junior down. Josh Ravitz

Publisher's summary

In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: A comet will obliterate life on Earth in 36 years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter?

While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, Junior's loved ones emerge with parallel stories - his anxious mother; his brother, a cocaine addict turned pro-baseball phenomenon; his exalted father, whose own mortality summons Junior's best and worst instincts; and Amy, the love of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that could save humanity. While our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from a doomed planet, Junior's final triumph confounds all expectation, building to an astonishing and deeply moving resolution.

Ron Currie, Jr., gets to the heart of character, and the voices who narrate this uniquely American tour de force leave an indelible, exhilarating impression.

©2009 Ron Currie (P)2009 Penguin

Critic reviews

"Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions.... He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own.... Throughout the story there is the sheer delight of Mr. Currie's fresh, joltingly funny imagery.... Above all Everything Matters! radiates writerly confidence. The excitement that drives the reader from page to page is not about the characters. It's about seeing what Mr. Currie will try next." (Janet Maslin, New York Times)

"Currie's novel is extraordinary, a lively narrative that slaloms from the exhilerating to the numinous to the achingly sad, all tied together by the author's sharp, funny voice." (NPR)

"Superb.... Some scenes make you laugh out loud. There are passages of beauty and wicked turns of phrase...marvelously, Currie suffuses his unhappy and disparate characters with salvation." (The Los Angeles Times)

What listeners say about Everything Matters!

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    150
  • 4 Stars
    107
  • 3 Stars
    47
  • 2 Stars
    21
  • 1 Stars
    10
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    143
  • 4 Stars
    60
  • 3 Stars
    15
  • 2 Stars
    4
  • 1 Stars
    1
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    111
  • 4 Stars
    58
  • 3 Stars
    32
  • 2 Stars
    14
  • 1 Stars
    6

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Everything Is A Plot Twist!

If, like me, you were drawn to "Everything Matters" by the description of the novel as a story of a man who knows when the world will end, you may be disappointed by the initial few hours of the book. The obtuse style of the novel takes a while to get used to, and, for me, never completely gels, but it eventually reveals a family drama with world destruction as distant backstory. The biggest problem I had with "Matters" is its relentless need to prove itself, piling on quirk after quirk, plot twist after plot twist until, frankly, I just didn't care anymore. That's not life, that's melodrama. Currie gains some redemption with a heartfelt third act, but it's too little, too late for this reader to recommend the book without reservations. The voice cast, for the most part, is excellent.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Don't Give Up On This One

I almost chucked Everything Matters at the start. It starts off with a freaky narrator discussing stuff that makes no sense...but stick with it. The author creates some memorable characters and throws into very strange situations. Very unpredictable with unique writing style that I eventually found enjoyable. Essentially a love story told in a quirky science-fictionesque style.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Moving and engrossing

I happened to listen to this book whenever I needed a break (to cool off my smoking brain) from Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds. Coincidence? You be the judge ;>) I found this book engrossing. At times I wondered if I was listening to the inside story of a schizophrenic's illness, at other times I wondered if the whole thing was just one big metaphor, and at still other times the impending end of the world faded to the background and I just witnessed the lives of the characters. For anyone who likes to ponder the imponderable, this book is wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking. (I wish the title did not have the exclamation mark in it. It cheapens the weight of the story and the ideas. I don't know why that matters, except that everything does...)

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful, thoughtfully written and well narrated

Beautifully written. The characters are understandable, distinct, and grow over time. And just about the time I thought I had things figured out, something surprising would happen. I loved this book and did not want it to end. I downloaded this because it was the book chosen by all incoming Duke freshmen to read last year. This is, frankly, a book you would want your freshman child to read. It leaves you thinking about the importance of things long after the last sentence is done.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing

Possibly the best audiobook I've listened to all year. For me, one measure of a great audiobook is that it leaves me glad that I chose to listen rather than read the printed book, and this one certainly meets that mark. The narration was perfect.

The book itself was incredibly moving without ever being sappy...if you like Vonnegut, you should really give this one a try.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A Treasure I Needed to Read

Within the first four minutes I knew this was a book I wanted to listen to. The intrigue associated with the main premise captured my attention at the start and held it for 13 hours. I just had to know what was going to happen. Everything Matters is an exploration of the human condition set against the most dire circumstances imaginable. It's raw like Catcher in the Rye is raw, but the Sci Fi angle provides an extra twist that expands it way beyond the limited realm of Holden Caulfield. By the end of the book, you love every single character as they struggle against their dysfunctional lives and come to realize, as does the reader, that everything really does matter! This is not a new story, but the way it is told is especially compelling. Everything Matters is a literary piece of art that should have much higher reviews. Don't hesitate to spend a credit on this one!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Worth coming back to after two years.

I enjoyed the book. Solid form of mild Sci-Fi with characters you could enjoy following along a path of doom. There wasn't much there that bent too far away from the mainstream idea of what is considered odd. No headlong dives into pools of the twisted but there was a few turn of events that brushed close to those things.
If you are looking for a solid story, which has a slow to medium pace build, and characters that you grow to enjoy, then this book should do you right.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Riveting

This was one of those books that makes it hard to turn off the iPod and go to work. Interesting characters, surprising plot twists, superb narration. This goes in my top 10 and will merit a second listen in the future.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

good idea, imperfect execution

One thing I'll say about Everything Matters is that its plot messed with my expectations. Not that I had a lot of expectations about a novel that opened with disembodied voices telling a developing fetus that the world would end in 36 years, but Currie's story of a typical American life with a few very untypical things about it dodges easy categorization. It's neither magic realism, nor science fiction, nor a supernatural tale, but more of an earnest existential drama about the choices people make with their lives.

That said, I thought Everything Matters did a flawed job of living up to its own ambition. At times, it sucked me in with its soulful character studies, but other times, it felt like a string of self-indulgent, slightly unbelievable vignettes of the sort a gifted but amateur writer might bring to a workshop. Currie clearly wants readers to respond emotionally to his story, and pummels us with one piece of drama after another. On a page-by-page level, it's involving and sometimes sadly moving, but as a whole, the story seemed a bit unreal and the characters' motives somewhat arbitrary. As I progressed, I wondered if Currie had really known where he was going with his book, or was just fumbling around for plot ideas and trying to keep the reader's sense of incredulity from catching up. Now that I've finished it, I can't totally disown this impression.

But, I will say that Everything Matters at least tries for something different, even if it falls a little short in execution. Currie asks some serious questions and doesn't wrap everything up neatly -- in fact, the bleak but beautiful ending wasn't the one I would have seen coming at the beginning. You may find yourself, when all is said and done, pondering the choice the main character makes about three quarters of the way through the book, wondering what other paths he (or the author) might have taken. I'll give this book a thumbs up for that, even if it won't make any of my top ten lists.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Ask yourself: When you know the end, what matters?

The question is asked and answered, but the journey there is not what you expect...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful