Two Guys from Verona

by James Kaplan

Will and Joel are two forty-three-year-olds in a New Jersey suburb on the verge of the millennium. Will is a married, middle-class soul in torment; Joel is a mad closet genius who sees the world as nobody else does. Will pities Joel; Joel pities Will. Then their twenty-fifth high school reunion changes everything. Two Guys from Verona is a mystery, but not in the conventional sense. Against the backdrop of an unraveling marriage, of romance old and new, and of a community losing its center, Will and Joel plumb the enigmas of sex, love, friendship, and time itself. As the world moves into the inconceivable realm of the 2000s, each man's life takes a turn into a world he never could have imagined.