Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia.

These days, there's only one way to justify a novel about a pair of straight white men stumbling toward middle age: make it science fiction. Two Guys From Verona compresses American suburban consciousness to a fateful autumn in 1999, then inscribes the standard arc of the masculine psyche in terms of polar opposites and tectonic millennial anxiety.

Joel Gold and Will Weiss, both north of forty, have lived in Verona, New Jersey, forever. Their existences, however, couldn't have veered more dramatically from early indications. Will, the high-school geek, is married with two kids, works for his father's cardboard-box business, lusts after his secretary, fetishizes his portfolio (the Dow is surging toward 10,000), and suspects his wife of having an affair with her real-estate agent. Joel, the teenage golden boy, has become "a guy who should have gone places, done things: a guy who lives with his mother, a weird old broad" while working at the local Sub Shop, and pining endlessly for Cindy Island, his lost Petrarchian Laura. The men remain friends, however, cruising Verona in Joel's decrepit '74 Impala, one guy consumed by loss, the other captivated by gain. Matters worsen when a conglomerate proposes a generous buyout of Weiss Containers and an adolescent punk-gamine develops a fascination with creepy Joel.

Even with radar not primed by Updike and Cheever, you can spot the vindictive inversion coming a mile away, but Kaplan's satiric bent keeps the narrative frisky. Joel, naturally, comes off as the one to root for. Where Will seems capable of exiting his daunting narcissism only by calling the Fidelity hot line to check his swelling balances, Joel convenes with the world around him through a semiotically revisionist empathy. "Color," Joel maintains, "is personal . . . Jade is a shell of a word . . . a way to get people to feel less by assuming they agree. What matters is my jade."

That Joel prefers to engage in secret walks in the woods to salve his emotional wounds - whereas Will salivates over the capricious Dow's castles in the sky - is typical of Kaplan's enthusiasm for prefiguring his characters' destinies through minor-key irony that builds to operatic retribution or unexpected salvation. Will, whom we are consistently reminded lacks common sense ("You're a smart kid," comments his father after the buyout evanesces, "but you've still got a lot to learn about doing business"), falls in for especially unpleasant punishment. Joel, by contrast, represents sound judgment distilled to its demoralizing essence: he tentatively resumes a high-school affair with a woman who has grown up to be the wife of a mobster; his first vacation in eleven years finds him on a quest to find Cindy Island, who, when he surprisingly does (Kaplan has implied she's dead), sadly informs him that "the past is past."

Kaplan uses a derailed party to trigger the onslaught of horribles that will alter personal history. Will and his wife, Gail, attend a New Year's Eve fete thrown by the father of the punk girl Joel is obsessed with. After the clock has chimed 2000, the daughter stomps out of the house into the freezing cold. When a mutilated, unidentifiable body turns up several days later, everyone assumes the worst. In quick succession, the Dow crashes hard, Will learns of Gail's infidelity, and he's left to freeze to death in the woods by the mobster whose wife Joel is screwing.

Will's future, it turns out, is a miserable fabrication, and the case of mistaken identity that almost kills him (he only loses a few toes, plus his wife, children, and all his money) serves to bolster the renaissance of his friendship with a rejuvenated Joel. Even after the heavens tumble, Kaplan's bittersweet assessment anticipates the next hundred years in the suburbs: "Someone was remodeling; someone was doing OK."

Matthew DeBord is a frequent contributor to FEED.