The brothers K

Review by Booklist Review

/*STARRED REVIEW*/ Duncan burst onto the literary scene nearly 10 years ago with The River Why, which critics likened to Catch-22 and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His second novel, the story of a baseball-loving, God- and mother-fearing family, brings to mind the works of John Irving but only to accentuate where Irving falls short and where Duncan flies (not unlike patriarch Papa Toe's incredible final pitch). While Irving, too, explores the joy and tragedy of family life, he is often manipulative, wringing tears from unwilling readers. That's not the case with Duncan. He raises the Chance family from toddlers to adults using multiple first-person narratives, letters, and excerpts from the boxes of writings and clippings the mother has saved, and in the process he creates an engagingly unique and real family. The reader hates to see the Chance children--Kincaid (the main narrator), Irwin, Pete, Everett, Bet, and Fred--grow up. But they must and do, from a minor-league baseball life on the road in the 1950s, into the freedoms--real and imagined--of the 1960s, into Vietnam, horribly, and out of it. This book is laugh-out-loud funny throughout, and yet the memory of a young child pointing at the moon nearly destroys the father, and the reader as well. The Brothers K does what a novel should do, what one almost despairs of contemporary fiction ever doing: it teaches you something, makes you think, breaks your heart, and mends it again. (Reviewed May 1, 1992)0385240031Eloise Kinney

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Duncan took almost 10 years to follow up the publication of his much-praised first novel, The River Why, but this massive second effort is well worth the wait. It is a stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam. One son becomes an atheist and draft resister; another immerses himself in Eastern religions, while the third, the most genuinely Christian of the children, ends up in Southeast Asia. In spite of the author's obvious affection for the sport, this is not a baseball novel; it is, as Kincaid says, ``the story of an eight-way tangle of human beings, only one-eighth of which was a pro ballpayer.'' The book portrays the extraordinary differences that can exist among siblings--much like the Dostoyevski novel to which The Brothers K alludes in more than just title--and how family members can redeem one another in the face of adversity. Long and incident-filled, the narrative appears rather ramshackle in structure until the final pages, when Duncan brings together all of the themes and plot elements in a series of moving climaxes. The book ends with a quiet grace note--a reprise of its first images--to satisfyingly close the narrative circle. Major ad/promo; author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

If John Irving reimagined The Brothers Karamazov as one of his kooky families and Thomas Pynchon did a rewrite, the result might be something close to this long-awaited second novel by the author of The River Why ( LJ 2/15/83). The brothers are the Chance boys, sons of Papa Toe, a minor league pitcher whose crushed thumb is replaced by a transplanted toe, and his devout Seventh Day Adventist wife. Like Dostoevsky's Karamazovs, the Chances speculate on the nature of God, delve into the nuances of what constitutes moral behavior, experience evil, suffer from criminal acts, and, finally, determine that God is love and love redeems. But these are American boys, and although their lives contain some terrible moments, this is essentially a comic novel. Among its many merits, it reflects far better than most fiction the wide variety of Sixties experiences, giving student radical and Vietnam grunt alike their sympathetic due. Baseball provides the central metaphor for this huge hypnotic novel, but although in that sport a ``K'' indicates a strikeout, here it scores a home run.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Another quintessentially American saga from Oregon writer Duncan, moving from the metaphysics of fishing in his first novel (The River Why, 1983) to an exploration here of bush-league baseball and the perils of Seventh-Day Adventism during the Vietnam era. The remarkable Chance family consists of six precocious children orbiting at various altitudes and velocities around their equally distinctive parents. Papa Hugh is a sublimely talented pitcher whose career is cut short by an accident in which his thumb is crushed, while Mama Laura zealously wields Adventist tenets to guard herself and her brood against devils and doubts. Four brothers and twin sisters grow up in this pressure-cooker of frustration and blind faith, which becomes more intense as the boys go their separate ways and encounter maternal resistance. Hugh has an operation in which part of his big toe is grafted onto his thumb, prompting the return of his self-respect and a stirring comeback in the minors, but the family situation continues to decay when Vietnam turns one son into a draft-dodger on the lam in Canada and claims another--the gentlest and most religious of the lot--as a foot soldier, until conflict between the boy's faith and daily reality brings him to assault an officer who ordered the execution of a child prisoner. After he's been shut away in an Army hospital and battered by electroshock treatment, his family reunites to free him, bringing him home just as Hugh begins a rapid, losing battle with cancer. Unfortunately losing focus as it tracks family members around the world to Vietnam and British Columbia as well as rural India, this epic story is still marvelously detailed and poignant, and a garden of delights for baseball lovers.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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CHAPTER ONE Chevalier   Thank you! Thank you! --last words of D. T. Suzuki Camas, Washington/September/1956   Papa is in his easy chair, reading the Sunday sports page. I am lying across his lap. Later he will rise to his feet and the lap will divide into parts--plaid shirt, brown leather belt, baggy tan trousers--but for now the lap is one thing: a ground, a region, an earth. My head rests on one wide, cushioned arm of the chair, my feet on the other. The rest of me rests on Papa. The newspaper blocks his face from view, but the vast pages vibrate in time to his pulse, and the ballplayer in the photo looks serious. I ask no questions. I stay quiet. I feel his slow, even breathing. I smell his smoke.   On the opposite chair arm, beside my argyle shins, is a small ashtray--an upholstered sandbag with five brass grooves arching over a green glass dish. Papa's cigarette smolders in the center groove. It has no filter. It's called a Lucky Strike. Past its slow blue smoke is the diningroom window. Past the window, yellowing maples and a low gray sky. Past the maples and under the sky, a neighbor man with a pitchfork, burning an immense pile of black limbs and old brown leaves.   Papa's hand appears. It hangs above the ashtray. It is blue-veined, black-haired, brown-skinned, scarred and powerful. It takes up the cigarette and disappears behind the paper. The neighbor man throws an enormous forkful of leaves onto the burn pile, smothering the flames. Papa takes a deep breath. The hand returns the cigarette to the same brass groove, a quarter-inch orange coal on the end of it now, the smoke rising up much faster than before. A dense cloud of white billows up through the smoldering leaves. Papa breathes out. The leaves ignite. Even through the window I hear them bursting into flame. Papa turns a page, the paper makes the same crackling, burning sound, and I glimpse his eyes before the paper reopens: they are serious, like the ballplayer's.   Idly Papa's long fingers twist the ashtray in a circle. Slowly the man with the pitchfork circles his burning brush. The hand picks up the cigarette. The man forks more leaves onto the fire. The hand returns the cigarette, folds it against the green glass, crushes the hot coal with the tip of a bare finger. The man stares for a moment into the fire, then sticks his fork in the ground and walks away.   The newspaper shudders, closes, then drops, and there is his face: the sun-browned skin and high cheekbones; the slightly hooked, almost Bedouin nose; the strong jaw still shiny from a late-morning shave, a few missed whiskers at the base of each nostril; the gray eyes--clear, kind, already crowfooted, and always just a little sad around the edges.   There he is. Papa. There is my father.   The screen door slams. I lurch, open my eyes--newspaper falls from my body. I am lying alone in my father's chair. He has vanished right out from under me, leaving a blanket of sports page when he left. I look outside: the sky is still low and gray, yellow leaves still waving, but the burn pile is ashes and the man and pitchfork are gone. I look at the chair arm: the ashtray is still there, but the green glass is clean, the ashes and Lucky butt gone.   I can tell by the heaviness of step that it's my brother Irwin back in the kitchen. When I hear the icebox open, I know that neither Mama nor Papa is in the house. I hear him gulping milk straight out of the bottle. Germs ... I hear the careful folding and refolding of wax paper round a plate of leftovers. Thou shalt not steal ... I hear a shout somewhere outside, and Irwin darts into the diningroom, his mouth stuffed full of something, his eyes bulging, then, seeing no one, relieved.   "Where's Papa?" I ask.   He jumps, bolts the food, chokes a little, laughs. "Where are you?"   I sit up in the chair.   He laughs again, starts back toward the kitchen, then calls back to me, "Battle Ground. Playin' ball."   The screen door slams.   I am alone on the floor of mine and Irwin's room now, picturing Battle Ground. I've been there, Mama says. It's got the big park with the pool where I waded with my boats when it was too hot to be in the bleachers, she says. I can't remember the bleachers, I can't remember the ballfield, but I remember the pool. And now I think I remember the tall men with caps and gloves running over the grass, splashing in and out of the water, throwing and hitting baseballs and singing Aaaaaa! Aaaaaa! and Hum Babe! and Hey, Batter! My oldest brother, Everett, showed me how they sing. He said that Hum Babes are special, because Papa is the pitcher and it's his pitches that hum. I said, They call Papa a babe? No, Everett said, they just sing Hum Babe to the pitches, but some players call him Smoke because of his Lucky Strikes and fastball, and some call him Hook because of his curveballs and nose. I said I thought they were just plain baseballs. He said they were, but that curveballs and fastballs are kinds of pitches, and pitches are special throws nobody but the pitcher knows how to make, and Papa has seven different kinds, not counting his different deliveries. He didn't say what a delivery was, but he said Papa had a kind that went ffffffffwirp! called a sinker, and a kind that went ffffffffweet! called a slider and a kind that went ffffffffwow! called a forkball and a kind that went bleeeeeeeeeeurp! called a change-up and a secret kind too, called a knuckler, which he only used when he was red-hot since it might go rrow!rrow!rrow! or might do nothing at all, and I felt almost like crying by then, I was so confused and wanted so much not to be. Everett noticed, and shoved me in a gruff, friendly sort of way. Don't worry, he said. Next summer I'd be old enough to go watch him pitch, and soon as I watched him I'd understand everything fine ...   But I don't want to understand next summer. I want to understand now. So I have the sports page here beside me on the floor, open to the ballplayer with the serious face. And this is not an orange crayon in my mouth. It's a Lucky Strike. "Fffffffweeet!" I tell it. This isn't the lid of a mayonnaise jar in my hand, either. It's an ashtray. "Bleeeeeeeeeeurp!" And Bobby, my bear, is the neighbor man and this salad fork is his pitchfork and these piled blankets are the pile of burning brush. Because I am not me. I am Smoke! I am my father! and the harder I suck the Lucky the hotter burns the brush! Aaaaaaaaaaa! the fire hums, babe, the flames ffffffffwirp and ffffffffwow! And when I spin my ashtray the neighbor man is helpless: I spin, spin, spin it, he whirls round and round and round. Then I throw, I forkball, I pitchfork my Lucky clear up to the sky and rrow!rrow!rrow! flaming leaves and limbs and papers knuckle every which way and the trees and batters and people and houses burn! burn! burn!   I saw.   I saw what Papa was doing.   And next year I'll go with my brother to watch all the ballplayers splash and throw and sing.     Excerpted from The Brothers K by David James Duncan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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