Drew Silver is divorced and his estranged teenage daughter, Casey, thinks so little of him that she confides in him about her accidental pregnancy solely because she’s least worried about letting him down. He spends his days collecting royalty checks from the one popular song produced by his former band, The Bent Daisies, and hanging out by the pool at his musty apartment complex with other divorced, disgraced men. Silver has all but lost the will to live until he finds out that he has a heart defect that will likely kill him if left untreated by surgery.
Confronted with the possibility of death, Silver come to this sad realization: his life isn’t worth saving. So Silver boldly decides against the surgery even as his rabbi father, doting mother, ex-wife, and even her doctor fiancé gather around him to in an effort to change his mind. As his ex-wife’s wedding draws nearer and Casey continues to struggle with a difficult choice, Silver is suddenly forced to come to terms with his continual failings as a father, husband, and man. He decides, then, that instead of having the surgery and prolonging his already miserable life, he should refocus his efforts on living out the rest of his time to the fullest and becoming a better man to his daughter, his ex-wife, and his family.
While Silver is certain that his family would all be better off without him, his condition and his grapple with mortality gradually allow him to reconnect and communicate with them in ways that were foreign to him as a man who has always been a failure in love. While this book is about death, there are incredibly poignant moments that prove that this is also a book about life and how we mourn lost time and cope with the changing forms of love. The end, which is a neat surprise, is completely satisfying and, without giving anything away, reaffirms that what makes life worth living is simply having the will to live.
