Important Things That Don't Matter: A Novel Book

So Dad's around lately. That's it. And I want to tell you things, throw fragments your way that I barely understand. Because it's just funny, flat out, the way someone you don't even know can get up in your face, tweak things that should be so ordinary. Or I think it's funny. Maybe you will too.

Hailed by The New Yorker as "a fictional report from the strip-mall front lines of Generation Y," Important Things That Don't Matter is a provocative, moving, darkly funny portrait of family and divorce, a boy and his father, the eighties and nineties, and sex and intimacy that raises vital questions about a generation just now reaching adulthood.

The New Yorker

In this fictional report from the strip-mall frontlines of Generation Y (or are we on to Z?), Amsden's twenty-year old narrator offers a selective account of his life and loves in dull, suburban Maryland. His parents are divorced, and his father is an intermittent, largely pathetic presence. Nonetheless, the encounters with this hapless parent are the touchstones of the young man's memory. Another abiding obsession is the landscape around him, the overnight subdivisions and the cyclical shopping centers, of which he says, "Whoever designed them knew that families would spend their lifetimes in these parking lots, going in and out of these stores, and wanted to create a building so fantastically boring that no one noticed it was really there."