The Brothers K, by David James Duncan

I was given this book for Christmas by a dear friend. It is either "one of her favorite books" or "her favorite book." Either way, that's a lot of pressure to put on a mere gift exchange. One lives in fear that one will loathe the book and then have to tell one's friend lies.

And that is why I put off starting the book for so many months. I actually began reading this in April. It starts out a bit slow, picks up steam for several hundred pages, and then (POW) bogs down in a morass so deep that had this friend not been so dear, I'm afraid I would have given up on it completely. The ending makes it nearly worthwhile, however.

Having read "The Brothers Karamazov" when I was a callow college student, and having virtually no memory of it, I can't tell what comparison Duncan was trying to make with Dostoevsky. There is a stretch where Russian literature is alluded to a great deal, but it didn't seem enough to direct one's attention to the title of the book.

The portrayal of family dynamics is very honest, but I felt the ending was too facile and too neatly and tidily tied up. Unfortunately, in my experience, neither life nor (especially) families are rarely facile, neat, or tidy. Maybe I just don't like family sagas like this because I always wonder, "OK, they've all found their place, but what about next year when one sister gets in a giant argument with one brother over something that happened in 1987 that no one else remembers, and the whole family implodes over it? What about when they all start arguing over when to put Mom into a nursing home, or which nursing home, or who will be paying for the nursing home?"

In the end, the characters will definitely stay with me. Much of the internal scenery of the book will as well. And there are some good lines, well-written paragraphs and chapters worth rereading for their sheer artistry. The section on the boys hiding in the hedge watching their father practice pitching is beyond description, for instance: just perfect.