It Won't Always be This Great

(Paperback)

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In the crushing complacency of suburbia, mid-life crises pop in unannounced on men's lives. For one Long Island podiatrist, it takes an impromptu act of vandalism just to make him aware of his own being. Walking home in the sub-zero wind chill of a Friday night, he stumbles on a bottle of horseradish and mindlessly hurls it through the window of a popular store selling clothes to over-sexed tweens. This one tiny, out-of-character impulse turns his life upside-down, triggering waves of terrifying fear, crooked cops, and charges of anti-Semitism.The story is told by this same podiatrist, an endearingly wide-eyed and entirely nameless narrator, to what he regards as the perfect audience: a comatose college friend. Yet, our narrator's most unique quality lies simply in his glowing love for his wife Alyse, the girl of his dreams whom he met in college and still can't quite believe he managed to marry. She is the mother of his two children, Esme and Charlie, who are just starting to come into their own minds and experiencing their first encounters with prejudice.Prior to the bottle-throwing incident, our narrator had just enough going on in his own life to keep him interested. Now friends and neighbors push his intrigue-filled existence into wildly unpredictable places, especially nineteen year old Audra Uziel, a long-time patient who's brilliant, rebellious, and sexy, with a taste for happily married men.And oh: Audra also happens to be the daughter of Nat Uziel, self-proclaimed community patriarch whose store window the infamous horseradish bottle demolished. Always on the lookout for anti-Semitism, Nat doesn't know the true culprit but doesn't let that stop him from loudly whipping his world into a frenzy, forcing our narrator into hiding in plain sight.Pushed to the edge by his own desires, despairs, and disappointments, our narrator is about to find out what it's like to become a criminal, and what his crucifyingly dull neighborhood looks like in the midst of continuing controversy.

Reviews

After a sequence of events leaves him walking home after work, a Long Island podiatrist stumbles over an object on the ground and hurts his ankle. In a moment of anger, he hurls the object, a small jar of horseradish, through the window of a clothing store. So begins our narrator's quirky odyssey into the depths of his own psyche. This very entertaining novel (it should be entertaining: it's written by a longtime Seinfeld writer) is a shining example of non-sequential storytelling; the narrator is relating the events of the incident and its aftermath to a friend, but chronologically, he's all over the map, as one thing sparks a memory of something else, and the narrator is suddenly relating an episode that took place years earlier. This isn't as difficult to follow as it might sound--in fact, as our podiatrist digs deeper into his story, we begin to see its various threads reaching back into time and realize how the past is connecting to the present. The book is full of questions that don't get answered right away (even the identity of the person to whom the narrator is speaking is clouded in mystery), and it features, like life itself, a story that seems simple enough until you really get into it. This is Mehlman's first novel, and it's wonderful.--BOOKLIST (STARRED REVIEW)
Debut novelist Mehlman is a former Seinfeld writer ("yada, yada," "spongeworthy"), so you get an idea of his sensibilities. In this tale, a 51-year-old Long Island podiatrist twists his ankle on a bottle of horseradish on the ground, and in a rage tosses the bottle through a store window. Amid cries of anti-Semitism, the wrong man is arrested. Add an American Beauty-style infatuation with the teen daughter of the store owner and a host of other Seinfeldian connections, and you have a twisted but thought-provoking and humorous take on suburban family life.
Given that Mehlman is a former writer for Seinfeld, it's no surprise to find his first novel powered by an irresistibly irreverent tone and relentless observational humor about the mundaneness of everyday life. The unnamed narrator, a lovable but neurotic 51-year-old podiatrist who's still in love with his wife after decades of marriage, experiences a brief moment of rage while walking home through his largely Jewish Long Island town during Shabbos. After stumbling over a bottle of horseradish and twisting his ankle, he hurls the bottle through the window of a clothing store. The unnoticed act of vandalism takes on new meaning when the store's owner, one of the town's more prominent Orthodox Jews, suspects that it's an act of anti-Semitism and wants the powers that be to prosecute it as a federal hate crime. The story becomes exponentially more complicated (and comical) after a bigoted artist is arrested for the crime and the FBI is brought in to investigate. Equal parts moral dilemma, subtle social commentary, and journey of self-discovery, Mehlman's tale of a man forced outside the comfort zone of his 'respectable, decent, low-impact, relaxed-fit, gluten-free world' is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving.
Peter Mehlman will likely always be best known for penning such standards as 'Yada-yada-yada, 'double-dipping, and 'sponge-worthy' during his eight-year writer-producer run on Seinfeld. But he has uncommon range, having been on staff at the Washington Post and SportsBeat with Howard Cosell, as well as writing for GQ, Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. His first novel, It Won't Always Be This Great (Bancroft Press, $25), takes an entertainingly sly and subversive slant on everyday life in the suburbs, just as Seinfeld did with urban living.
Peter Mehlman's first novel, It Won't Always Be This Great, is not the post-Gatsby, Great American Novel that we've all been waiting for--the story that captures the hopes, the fears, the rhythms and resentments of a younger generation. But it is something almost as noteworthy: the Great American Jewish Novel. Specifically, the Great American Jewish Novel of the Early 21st Century, Comedy Division. As the nameless narrator tells his story to a college pal lying comatose in a hospital bed, there are clear echoes of Catcher in the Rye and the inspired nothingness of Seinfeld. Throw in some catch-me-if-you-can themes from one of the greatest Russian novels--Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment--and basketball references with echoes of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, and this jokey dark comedy can claim serious literary inspiration... . While there's no talk of a contest or being master of your domain, in a nod to Philip Roth, there are repeated references to the narrator's masturbation habits... J.D. Salinger connections pop up again and again, as when the narrator talks about his beloved, precocious daughter, Esme. Not only does her name evoke one of Salinger's best and best-known short stories--'For Esme, With Love and Squalor'--but there are passages strikingly similar to those in which Holden talks about his beloved, precocious little sister, Phoebe: 'Esme once asked me, 'If you don't have enough money to stay in the Best Western, is there a Second Best Western' I think she was 8 at the time. Kid's a genius.'... Mehlman, 58 and a Santa Monica resident, excels in creating characters and bringing them to believable life. His scenes of a cozy family life and a couple still in love after many years of marriage all ring true, even though he's single and childless. Of course, he's also presumably never chucked a rock through the window of Forever 21. But he has imagined the consequences with dread and humor. And isn't that what great novelists do
What would the internal monologue of a Long Island podiatrist embroiled in community intrigue sound like if the good doctor had some of the neuroses and self-perception of 'Seinfeld' That question--a surprisingly entertaining one--is what Peter Mehlman explores in his first novel. Mehlman served as an executive producer on 'Seinfeld' and is credited with coining such immortal Seinfeldisms as 'yada yada' and 'shrinkage.' There aren't any catchphrases here, but he has brought sweetly funny family dynamics, with a side of low-stakes 'Law & Order' plot, to life.--WASHINGTON POST, IN NAMING IWABTG 1 OF 5 FUNNIEST AMERICAN BOOKS OF 2014, AND THE ONLY NOVEL

Author Bio

After graduating from the University of Maryland, Peter Mehlman, a New York native, became a writer for the Washington Post. He slid to television in 1982, writing for "SportsBeat with Howard Cosell." He then returned to writing full sentences for numerous national publications including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and a slew of women's magazines due to his advanced understanding of that gender.
One year after moving to Los Angeles, he wrote "The Apartment," the first freelance script produced by Seinfeld. Over the run of the show, Mehlman rose to executive producer and coined such Seinfeld-isms as "Yada Yada," "spongeworthy," "shrinkage" and "double dipping."
In 1997, Mehlman joined DreamWorks and created "It's like, you know...," a scathing look at Los Angeles. In recent years, he has written screenplays and humor pieces for NPR, Esquire, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, several of which were published in his collection Mandela Was Late. In addition, he has appeared on-camera for TNT sports and the Webby-nominated Narrow World of Sports. He lives in Los Angeles. This is his first novel.