In Heaven Everything is Fine

Book excerpt: A young man's initiation into the difficulty of life amidst the hard realities of love, waste, and failure Jeffrey DeShell's In Heaven Everything is Fine is a first novel with a difference. While engaging a traditional subject - a young man's initiation into the difficulty of life amidst the hard realities of love, waste, and failure - it does so in a peculiarly contemporary way. Reflecting a style of life into which a new generation is being inducted, the story is told through fragments of narrative and collaged excerpts from media reportage. The protagonists' state of mind is expressed through the very context of contemporary history which has created it. The whole projects the effect of humor and melancholy very much like the blues. In fact, the impact of the book is heavily informed by its allusion to contemporary rock music as it inherits the blues tradition.