After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different

Falling somewhere between Trainspotting and Like Water for Chocolate, Adam Gnade’s self-described “food novel” frames each chapter around a meal, and from there moves wild in all directions. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different takes place in San Diego taco shops and rundown beach apartments, on the amusement park boardwalk at 3am and in cars bound for Tijuana and drunken glory. Like Proust’s baroque autobiographical fantasies, this is a book rich with details and life. Gnade’s youthful characters sink to hard drugs and deep depression as they navigate life at the end of the last century. They celebrate and they battle with their demons and throughout it all they eat. This is not a food snob’s novel. Instead Gnade writes about the pain and joy of life and the ways that common, everyday food is there with us at each step. This is a book of deli sub sandwiches, endless burritos, eggplant parmesan, the magnificence of good sourdough bread, of box brownies and Nacho Cheese Doritos, rolled tacos and the perfect tortilla. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different is a raging, ecstatic, troubled book that shows a world of food and a world of life, each inextricable from the other.