Ikwezi reviewed The Brothers K by David James Duncan
Review of 'The Brothers K' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I very much wanted to like this book more, given my familiarity with this particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, my love of baseball, and the passing resemblance between the titular brothers of this tale and some relatives by marriage who grew up around the same time in the same place. But I really struggled with the epistolary conceit of the book, which meant that every word was supposed to be someone's written words to another person, and frequently it was someone's recital of yet another person's words to another person (they call that triple hearsay in my job). Somehow the author took this as license to let his (ahem, his characters') worst undergraduate writing impulses loose for long stretches of the book, which might have been fine if those passages still plausibly sounded like something an actual human being would have written to another human being, but reader, they …
I very much wanted to like this book more, given my familiarity with this particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, my love of baseball, and the passing resemblance between the titular brothers of this tale and some relatives by marriage who grew up around the same time in the same place. But I really struggled with the epistolary conceit of the book, which meant that every word was supposed to be someone's written words to another person, and frequently it was someone's recital of yet another person's words to another person (they call that triple hearsay in my job). Somehow the author took this as license to let his (ahem, his characters') worst undergraduate writing impulses loose for long stretches of the book, which might have been fine if those passages still plausibly sounded like something an actual human being would have written to another human being, but reader, they did not.
I quickly came to love and care about the fates of the characters (most of them, anyway), but for much of the latter part of the book it felt like I had to fight through this bad writing to reach the resolution of their stories (the ending felt unsatisfying, tbh, but I was too exhausted by then to care). I will also confess that I was on the verge of adding this to my "dropped" list when I got bogged down in the excruciating depictions of the locals during one character's deeply implausible trip to India. One last complaint: I could not discern any parallels to the Brothers Karamazov, other than that each of those four brothers fairly neatly lined up with one of the titular brothers, but if that was intentional, it is beyond me why the ending focused on the Smerdyakov (sp) of this book. OK, one more complaint: the author does not sound like an actual baseball fan, or at best one of those lapsed ones who stopped watching when they put in stadium lights or the DH or something.
