The Brothers K: The Best Novel You've Never Read

The Brothers K - David James Duncan

Author's note: republished to celebrate the 2023 release of David James Duncan's first novel in more than two decades, Sun House.

 

It's a fairy tale. It has no sleeping princess, no handsome prince, no troll under a bridge, no voracious and avaricious giant. Or perhaps it does. It's a story of the Chance family - a father, a mother, four sons and two daughters - and how they all grew up (even the parents) during the turbulent 60s. It's a story of the strength of love; a fable about the force of faith; a parable of the power of one's dreams. But most of all, it's a saga of the strength of the ties that bind a family. And, yes, it is a story about baseball.

The Lineup

Leading off and playing second base, Beatrice "Bet" Chance. Bet's a lifetime .275 hitter, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist and a former Famous Scientist.

Batting second and playing shortstop, Winifred "Freddy" Chance. Freddy, Bet's identical twin sister (and therefore tied for youngest in the family), is also a former Famous Scientist, although unlike her sister she's let her SDA membership lapse.

In the third slot, center-fielder Peter Chance. Just returned from a sabbatical season spent praying for the Katmandu Gurus, Peter – the Chance family's most gifted athlete – is on course to bat .412 this year.

Batting cleanup, the gentle giant, left-fielder Irwin "Winnie" Chance. Winnie not only leads the league in HRs, but he also has 169 career stolen hearts; a combination of strength and grace rarely seen in this game. He's also the most devout Christian (except, perhaps, his mother) in the family.

At the heart of the lineup, the diamond, and the Chance family; the pitcher: Hugh "Papa Toe" Chance. Hugh's held this team (and this family) together through sheer grit and determination; with just a little help from a surgically-modified pitching hand.

Batting sixth and playing first base, the narrator: Kincaid "Kade" Chance. Kade, the youngest son, is content to sit in the background and learn from the mistakes of his three older brothers.

In the seventh position, third baseman Laura "Mama" Chance: matriarch, fanatic Seventh-Day Adventist, logistics whiz, family gadfly; her stone fingers leave a gaping hole on the left side of the infield but never a hole in the hearts of her family.

Batting eighth and catching, Everett Chance. The number one son, Everett's spent the 1960s working on his college radical credentials, letting his BA to slip to .267.

Batting last and playing right field, Marion Becker "Grandawma" Chance. Mother to Hugh, grandmother to the Chance children, atheist, and ever a thorn in her daughter-in-law's faith. Grandawma is founder and chief advisor of the Famous Scientists.

The plot

David James Duncan, known to most as the metaphysical fly fishing guru of The River Why, created in the Chances a family that bears all the dysfunctional scars of reality: sibling squabbles, a mother's love, parental battles, a father's strength, jealousy, inseparable fraternity, fear and loathing, love and tenderness. Duncan created a family that is rooted in the bedrock of shared DNA and common history, a family so strongly grounded that even the most fearsome events could not reach all the way to the core of their peculiar clan. On the surface, this family should never have survived: the itinerant baseball-player father inherits his mother's atheism, while the mother blindly wraps herself in the trappings of her church. Such dire dichotomy of dogma should have doomed this family, and yet they survive.

The six Chance children grow up in a house full of both love and strife; where Mama's deep religious convictions more often serve to divide her family into opposing factions than to unite them. Papa's baseball career survives a seven-year hiatus caused by an injury that would have ended a lesser man's hopes of ever playing ball again. Papa's mother dies. The boys grow up and go off to college and then go their own ways: one to the east, one to the west, one to the north, one to the south. The twins stay home.

And then all hell breaks loose, and this scattered family must unite to face a crisis more dire than any they had ever imagined. And face it they do, but at a terrible cost.

The Cliche

It's not cliché, it's true: I did laugh, I did cry, I did reach for the hand of a loved one... as would you, whether you're a baseball fan or not.

I laughed because David James Duncan displays a bottomless well of humor and a talent for on-target (and at times withering) descriptive prose. Take for instance his word portrait of G. Q. "The Junkman" Durham, a Chance family friend:

The Bull's real name was Gale Q. Durham. What the Q. stood for was anybody's guess, but what the Bull stood for was definitely not the man's size, strength, or brand of tobacco, but his manner of "employing the King's & various lesser types of English." ...the mighty Bull was a bald-headed, tub-gutted hypoglycemic stroke victim who stood all of 5'9" ... weighed a doughy 199, grew winded when forced to rise from a chair or box seat, and needed bifocals if not binoculars to read the labels on his beer bottles, let alone to size up any sort of baseball prospect. The Bull sported one kidney, two small but patriotic eyes (red, white and blue), anywhere from two to five chins depending on whether he was watching gounders or pop-ups, and a pair of indelible mouth-corner tobacco stains that made him look like a puppet with its jaws hung on hinges.

Can you not just see The Bull peering myopically out of the page, his brown and snaggled teeth arrayed in ever so slight a grin?

Duncan's always slightly cockeyed view of the world is a consistent source of humor: I remember howling with laughter the first time I read of "centrifuging flickers" (A Famous Scientist experiment) – and every chapter has some little nugget of Duncan's wry humor imbedded, on subjects as far-ranging as child-rearing, flatulent goats, and the meaning of life as viewed by an Indian cricket fan.

I cried because of Duncan's sad (albeit hilarious) handling of the death of Grandawma, Hugh's mother; a death made no less noble by its circumstances:

First she looked up at the ceiling and said, "Oh!"

It was her last word. She said it softly, but with such hushed enthusiasm, perhaps even delight, that the twins immediately looked up at the ceiling too. But there was nothing there but plaster.

Next Grandawma closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and slowly began to bow her head -- another thing they'd never seen her so. Bet said later, with a somewhat wooden air of piousness, that it looked as though she'd been bowing her head to pray. But Freddy said not. Freddy said she bowed so slowly that it was more like an OSMI exhibit they'd once seen on the laws of kinetics. To me this seems the likelier explanation, since when the center of gravity passed the meridian the bowing head became a falling head that didn't slow or alter course till Grandawma's brow smacked the front rim of her cereal bowl, the milk and oatmeal splashed onto her neat gray bun, and the bowl stayed balanced, like a little cap, right there on top of her head. The twins gaped at her, saying nothing. Grandawma gaped down at the floor, also saying nothing. Her arms were folded neatly in her lap; her rambunctious old mouth was closed; except for the food on the floor and the bowl on her head, her comportment was perfect...

And last, I reached for the hand of a loved one. A few weeks ago, I blew a chance to share this passage with the Epinions community when I misread the purpose of a "famous one-liners" write-off. Had I been more aware (and more ready), this would have been my entry; and the last sentence of this passage would have been my one line:

[When Everett] said nothing, she gave him back his own rhetorical "I'll tell you where" and added: "Back to your imaginary revolution. And to your next . . . girlfriend or groupie or whatever you call your rotation of female admirers. Which just ain't my style. So I'll see you around, OK?"

That pretty well did it. Nothing left on the sidewalk beside her but a mute, half-blind, Everett-shaped pile of dry rot awaiting a dustpan. Which is why he didn't even see the lips coming as they reached right in through the brownness and bequeathed him a kiss which, for all its fleetingness and all his experience, he swears was his very first.

Been there, done that. You?

The trolls under the bridge

No coming-of-age novel about the 1960s can escape the awful reality of Vietnam and what that distant war did to our country and – on a more personal scale – our families. The Chance family suffered mightily; four draft-age sons produced a Canada-bound draft dodger, a 4-F failed inductee, and a long-term student deferment. The fourth son – devout Christian and ideal candidate for conscientious objector status – was blindsided by hatred: ogre number one was a self-serving "man of God" who was more interested in revenge than that peace that passeth understanding. The Chance son (as always) took his lot in stride and went off to serve in that "dirty little war," only to find that he would rather live his faith than follow orders. Ogre number two came along at that very moment to recapitulate the quintessence of Catch-22: Chance was crazy because he was religious, and he was religious because he was crazy;  and so the US Government (in the person of an Army psychiatrist) deemed it necessary to excise the young man's demons with sedatives and electroshock "therapy."

Nothing less than these events could reunite the scattered brothers; their sisters, and their parents.

The end

Through 600-plus pages we live with the Chance family. From Kade's narrative and the journals, letters, and other writings of his siblings, we learn how the vastly different personalities of mother and father served to shape the characters of their children. We see the scars of the fanaticism of the parents: Mama's religion, Papa's undying dream to play baseball; all visited on their children. We watch the family spread to the four winds in disarray, only to reunite in time of crisis. We see the horror of war, both on the battlefield and in the thousand little ways it effects those left behind. We see their love, anger, fear, sorrow, weakness, strength, joy... And through it all runs a single thread; the thread of family.

The Bottom Line

Pros: Brilliant and funny depiction of a classic American family

Cons: sometimes a little over-metaphysical

Summary: Duncan weaves baseball, fraternity, religion, love, and the excesses of the 1960s into one of the finest family histories in American literature.

Originally published at Epinions.com: copyright © 2001-2023 scmrak