Saturday, November 14, 2009
December Book: The Brothers K
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.
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Throughout the time I spent with The Brothers K, I found myself quoting from book and recommending this book to friends. Though written in the 1990's, it feels contemporary in its approach to religion, war, and politics. By scenes hilarious and poignant, we find that all the discussion of baseball, religion, politics, and family relationships all converge into a most enjoyable conclusion. This was one of the most thoroughly satisfying reads of our group.
- Evan Benjamin
too damn long, not on Kindle, font too small, too much talking. Did you finish Underworld? Me neither.
I had my earphones in so I couldn’t hear them, but my father’s ear hairs were most definitely growing. I was eating something and drinking some milk or maybe chocolate milk, sitting with my hoodie up and my feet hanging over the side of the couch.
“Sup?” I asked, not really caring.
“What?” said my dad. “Huh?”
“I said you’re a loser, dude,” I said.
“Hold on, let me turn this off.” He was using his books-on-tape voice, loud and kind of bothered because he’s trying to pay attention. If he’s listening to music, he groans a lot and makes other noises no one really wants to hear. “No, wait a sec,” he said. “Man, this is a great book.”
“That’s what she said,” I said. My dad’s not Seal- or MJ-bald. It’s more of a pattern thing. Some days, his hair is this kind of outline glow deal, less like a halo than a fishnet helmet, but on other days, it projects a lush sort of youthful thickness, attributable I guess to a combination of product and exercise, the type of which I didn’t want to consider as both he and the madre were both kind of singy in the shower that morning. Anyhow, he was scratching the little monkhole at the back of his head – it’s a lot like a tree in the forest – and flicking the remote like it’s on fire. Sportscenter, Family Guy, Bruce Almighty, a hint of a pause at C-Span for a kind of attractive older lady congressman, CNN, FoxNews for god’s sake, Colbert, Telemundo, some Planet Earthy thing which I wish he’d stick with for maybe a minute cuz it’s kind of cool. “Give me the remote,” I said, holding my hand out as if expecting a miracle.
About ten minutes and a thousand mini-stops at various stations later, Dad stopped and looked at me. “What?” he asked. “Didn’t you have dinner already?”
“I want to watch the game, Dad. Youk, Okajeemer, Godzilla, Gay-Rod,” I said. “Give me the remote.” The full ADD thing was giving me a headache. I was wanting an uninterrupted inning or two of baseball and my dad was going all Case of the Dog at Night on me.
“Oh, this is such a good book, hold on a sec,” he said. His Blackberry was buzzing on his belt.
“Your phones ringing, Dad,” I said, really loud.
“What?”
“Atticus!”
“Huh?”
“Your phone is ringing.”
“Can’t be,” he said. “I set it to vibrate.”
“Your phone is vibrating,” I said, still holding my hand out like Bernie Madoff in my dream.
He squinted down at his phone, moving it in a tiny circle as if that would provide corrected vision. “Your glasses are on top of the TV,” I said. “Give me the remote and you’ll have a hand free.”
“There,” he said. “They gave up. Whoa! Chapter 79! God, what a great book.”
“You’re a dildo,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, busting out a little smile. “You still want this?” I moved my hand a little closer to the remote. “What do you want to watch?” he asked.
“I told you,” I said. “Gay-Rod.”
“Gay Rod?”
“Yeah, Gay-Rod.”
“Never heard of it,” he said, moving the remote a little further from my hand.
“It’s homosexual pron, Dad,” I said.
“What? I’ve got to get this headset fixed.”
“Gay pronto,” I said. “From the suburbs of Toronto. Dude takes it in the rearonto.”
“Gay porn?” he asked. “What station is that on? I thought we had that privacy thing set up. With the squiggly lines. I thought we had that set up.”
“Yeah, but there’s ways to get around that,” I said.
“Ways,” he asked. “What ways? Can you get straight porn?”
“Straight pron?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Like where they take it in the fronto?”
“What?”
“Take your headset off.”
“No.”
“You’ll be able to hear what I’m saying.”
“Just a sec. This is a really good part.”
He was starting to annoy me. “I’ll tell you how to get the squigglies out.”
“Out of what?”
“The pron station.”
His hand moved the remote a little closer to my hand while the other hand moved toward his headset. “Nah,” he said. “Mom would kill me.”
He needs to do this professionally!
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