NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Meet Judd Foxman. He recently walked in on his wife having athletic sex with his boss, a Howard Stern-like shock jock, and now he's unemployed. His wife tells him she's pregnant, not by him. Then his father dies and he has to sit shiva with his squabbling family. For all this tsuris, he manages to be the hero of the funniest novel I've read all year.

Jonathan Tropper's "This Is Where I Leave You" belongs on a short shelf next to Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" and Tom Perrotta's "Little Children", sharply humorous yet sympathetic portraits of bumbling men figuring out how to be grown-ups.

Stick Martin Amis on the shelf, too; Tropper has a similar knack for colorful language. Judd's wife, Jen, drives a "marshmallow-coloured SUV". His mother, Hillary, a famous child psychologist, shoots her rabbi "a look sharp enough for a circumcision" when he suggests she shouldn't wear high heels for shiva.

"I have bad arches," Hillary says.

The oldest Foxman son, Paul, runs the family business, a small chain of sporting-goods stores, and is married to Alice, who's dying to get pregnant. Alice, by the way, lost her virginity to Judd, who was her high school boyfriend. Got all that?

The only sister, Wendy, is married to a hedge-fund guy who's always on his mobile phone making deals. The youngest child, Phillip, has too much charm for his own good, and has never managed to settle down with a job or a woman. He seems to have slept with every waitress in every bar in town.

The book is structured around the weeklong shiva period, and Tropper gets in plenty of jokes about the abundant platters of bagels and lox Jews send in lieu of flowers, as well as the great view of varicose veins and nose hairs provided by the low stools the mourners sit on. And then, like a jazz musician, he improvises.

Will Judd get back together with Jen? Why is Paul so mad at Judd? Is Hillary having an affair? In Jonathan Tropper's world, the questions are standard but the answers are always surprising.

"This Is Where I Leave You" is published by Dutton (339 pages, $25.95).