Duncan, David James - The Brothers K

When it comes to books, I’m pretty easy to please. Most of my reading comes from recommendations from friends, so the fact that I haven’t read a bad book in some time shouldn’t be a surprise.

My most recent reading project was The Brothers K by David James Duncan, a book that has long been treading water in the dregs of my reading list. Despite almost universal love for this novel from anyone I know who has ever read it, I must mention that I have mixed feelings.

The closest metaphor I can think of to describe The Brothers K is that of a frog in a pot of water, unaware that the water is warming. The novel starts with an almost idyllic setting: Camas, Washington in 1956, a family with four young boys, two baby twin girls, a baseball playing father and a slightly eccentric, Adventist mother. The father, Hugh Chance, a promising Triple A pitcher who just keeps missing his chance at the Bigs, has recently suffered an accident at the Camas paper mill, and his thumb is crushed, his career ostensibly over. Duncan shows a glimpse of each character with a minimalist’s pen, each boy an early look at who he will become. The family sits, watching the Ed Sullivan Show in the opening frames, and as the mother, Laura, hands Hugh a peeled orange, Duncan’s prose, written through the eyes of the youngest son, Kincaid, comes to life as Hugh and the rest of the family remember sadly the damaged appendage:

“Yet as we watch him now, our own faces falling, Papa is somehow able to maintain his poker face. And then his off hand, the good one, starts flickering faster than my eye can follow and orange slices go flying like Russian dancers. Everett, Irwin and Peter all catch their slices, and Peter has to whip his hands out of his sleeves to do it; my slices bounces right off my open mouth, but Papa’s everywhere hand somehow darts out, catches it, stuffs it back in…”

The portrait is of a family that loves each other intensely, held together by their gifted father, who is admired as a god by his sons. As the boys grow older, though, as any family will, their personalities develop, and the water starts to bubble.

There isn’t much to complain about here…the characters are slightly caricatured (Peter, the second son, one of the top prep baseball players in the United States, eschews a full-ride baseball scholarship to become a Harvard-educated mystic who studies in India, for instance), but they react realistically with each other. Each boy is, in a sense, a segment of society during the tumultuous 60’s: the passive narrator, Kincaid; the dumb-but-Christ-like Irwin; the arrogant but brilliant-minded Everett; the spiritual one, Peter. Their individual minds bounce off powerful themes like Vietnam and their mother’s fanatic Christianity, and the reactions seem to fit well and to make comment on how all of America reacted during those times. I was pulled in by these characters, and definitely immersed in the world that Duncan spins.

But my foremost complaint of the book is the way it leaps between darkness and goofy, even cloying, relational tension. My initial feeling is that Duncan overplays the redemptive themes of the book. I hate to say that, because redemptive themes also make the book great, but I found myself lingering in the book’s darker moments, thinking that those times seemed more real considering the personalities involved. Some of the darker moments are outright painful (one friend of mine, while reading, threw the book across the room and didn’t pick it up again for six months), but I can’t imagine this novel without them.

Overall, The Brothers K is buoyant in the face of sadness, and similar to A Prayer for Owen Meaney in its use of the individual characters to explain the massive themes of the 60’s and 70’s. From a personal standpoint, my mom and dad were being raised around the same time, a few miles South and West in Portland, and the pictures of the Columbia River, The University of Oregon Medical School (now OHSU), even the sweet stink of the paper mill in Camas, are glimpses back to my own family. The Brothers K is ambitious, loving and powerful, with a few flaws that, from the breathless recommendations of others, only bothered me.

David James Duncan, The Brothers K: B+