An eccentric music professor struggles with grief and guilt and questions the American justice system after his mother accidentally chokes to death on a wonton from a Chinese restaurant.
Someday Everything Will All Make Sense follows Luther van der Loon, an eccentric professor of medieval music at a New York university, as he navigates the stages of grief after his 62-year-old mother chokes on a wonton from a Chinese take-out. Luther invokes the American justice system against the restaurant whose "sloppy methods" he blames for his mother's death. He blames himself for failing to perform the Heimlich, a maneuver so simple that a child of six or seven could execute it.
Luther, who spent the entirety of his forty earthly years living with his mother in a co-op apartment in Tudor City, New York, must learn to conceive of a world in which his mother is no longer present. Luther finds redemption in music as he plans the annual symposium for his oddball group of early music colleagues. They believe, like Kepler and the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, that music is to be constructed according to the divine Pythagorean ratios. Slowly, and with the help of his therapist girlfriend, Cecilia, Luther gropes toward resolution. The novel speaks to the universality of loss and the struggle to make sense of the nonsensical.
Fans of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces will appreciate the maladroitness of the protagonist and the dark humor woven into the narrative, as will readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, who will appreciate the artful and in-depth evocation of the process of grieving.