Book Review: The Brother's K

I wrote this review a while back. The Brother's K is one of my all time favorites. Duncan lives somewhere along Lolo Creek.

Mr. Duncan is an old favorite of mine. I've read all of his handful of books, which range over an eclectic mix of topics: two novels, two or three collections containing both short fiction and non-fiction, and a book about religion/spirituality. I like them all, but his fiction has had the biggest impact on me, and in my view The Brothers K is his most durable novel, even if The River Why is, and will probably always be, his most famous.

The Brothers K follows a family, the children of which are baby boomers like Mr. Duncan. The main characters are the parents and three of the boys: Everett, Peter, and Irwin. The narrator is their brother, and they have two sisters as well. The children each go through the tumult of the 60s. Everett becomes a radical counterculture revolutionary type who flees for Canada from the Vietnam draft. Peter becomes a monkish devotee of Eastern spirituality and culture. And Irwin, the tragic figure, goes to Vietnam, trusting that God will take care of him. His tour of duty becomes a personal tragedy, which leads to the primary conflict of the novel, and which brings what had become a broken family back together again.

The other tragic figure of the novel is the father, who was a truly great baseball pitcher, but ends up a bitter blue collar factory man, who's lost his thumb to an accident, and so never got his shot at the big leagues. Nonetheless his luck improves mid-way through the novel, as Irwin's goes the other direction. His wife, the mother, with a tragic secret past, also plays a huge roll, mainly through her fundamentalist religion that she tries to force onto her children with varying levels of success and failure.

It's a great story, and is a real page turner for such a long novel. I highly recommend it.