The Brothers K by David James Duncan

I am tempted to save this until the end of all the catch-up posts I am doing today, but in terms of the order that I read the books, this is where it comes up. This was the most moving and influential book I read in the past 6 months, maybe the past year. It really stuck with me after I finished reading it. It's challenging - over 600 pages - but when I finished I missed the characters, I missed the story. I felt like I had spent a week on vacation with friends and then was plunged into a vacuum that suspended all communication with the outside world. I had a book hangover. Books are unlike alcohol in that sense - only the best books give you hangovers.

I haven't read The Brothers Karamazov, but I have it on good authority that The Brothers K is not in any way based on the novel with the similar title. It's the story of a family made up of 4 brothers (the principal characters), a mother and father, and twin daughters (the youngest).

The story is narrated by the youngest boy (Kincaid, they call him Cade, which I now want to name a child). His three other brothers are Peter, Irwin, and Everett. Peter and Everett are antagonists but in completely different ways - Peter passively, Everett aggressively. Irwin is a gentle giant with the best of intentions but not always the best ways of bringing them to fruition. Cade is your classic omniscient narrator...he'll tell you everything you want to know about the rest of his family, but that's pretty much your only way of getting to know anything about him - through his observations of the rest of his family. I think that's appropriate, though. Every family has a storyteller, which is as much an identity as any other role you could take on.

The father is a mill worker with latent dreams of making it in the world of professional baseball, the mother is an ardent Adventist, and the the twins kind of get mushed together as twins sometimes do, but they (these twins in particular, not twins in general) aren't all that important to the storyline so it doesn't really matter. Plus they annoyed me in general so I liked the way they were defined by their twinness.

Families have stories - anyone knows that - and this one is especially complex, just like most probably are if you know all of the details. I guess that's what it is - you get to know this family on such an intimate level through spending time with each of the boys that by the end, you have drawn similarities between their family and your own, and it's painful to let them go. They're far from perfect, but that's the charm. All the nicks and dents in the exterior of their family are the places you can grab onto and fill in. They don't slip out of your hands.

There's too much to go into to describe everything that happens in the novel, but if you're looking for something more serious, I really do recommend this book. You'll love the characters, and the story, and...everything.

Again, look for quotes from this book on the other blog.