Book Review: 'The Brothers K'

As long as I’ve been in Korea, I’ve wanted to do a brief book report on each book I read. As you can see, I’m behind. Nearly 5 months behind, so I will begin retroactively and start with the first book I read here, ‘The Brothers K’ by David James Duncan.

I am so appreciative that this is the book I began when I moved here. The theme is good ol’ America from about 50’s – 70’s. It was especially comforting to know that no matter how far from home I am, the feeling of home can be reached within a paragraph or two.

This book would be just as phenomenal if I hadn’t just moved across the world, but since I had, it offered a kind of nostalgia only David Duncan can make, especially since I’ve never lived through the time periods he writes about.

‘The Brothers K’ is transporting. The premise is simple enough, it’s about a family. That’s it. It tells the tales of one family and within the pages of description you might find your own family, or the neighbors’ family, or the family you always wished you had. It has all the details of what makes a family real. The characteristics of family members that are endearing, but more often than not, are a nuisance, which kinda makes them endearing. It describes the brother who talks louder to win an argument, or the sister who looks at life with scientific goggles, the quiet and easy to forget brother (who narrates this tale) and the genius brother that wishes he was a little more like his father and a little less like Einstein. A church fanatical mother who uses church to rip the family apart and play siblings against each other, and an athletic and loving father whose life turns upside down after a rather ordinary mill accident. But through each person's perspective, the individual celebrations of personalities and development, baseball is the component that allows this staggeringly different family from completely forgetting each other. Baseball holds them together in a way God, love or any other soul felt experience couldn’t. Baseball. Which, I suppose, is why it’s as American as you can get, even when eating intestinal soup with ramen noodles in a room where I am the only person whose eyes are as big dimes. And so this book quickly made it to the top of my ‘favorites’ list.

This is a book made me laugh out loud and within 10 minutes I’d be crying. My emotional response was so powerful. I feel connected and protective of every character, and even though the baseball rhetoric can be thick at times, each story is so sincere that it became engrained in my every day life. Usually I’m not one to write in the margins of a book, I get too caught up in the story, but I had to with this book, if only to highlight specific passages here in my blog. So here are a few (dozen) of my favs -- bare in mind these quotes are taken completely out of context, and I’m doing my best not to give anything away.

‘...whenever it’s really hot Elder Babcock’s sermon—even if it starts out being about some nice quite thing like the poor or meek or weak—will sooner or later twist like a snake its head run over to the unquiet subject of heaven and hell, and who all is going to which, and how long you’ll have to stay, and what all will happen to you when you there, and he goes on so loud and long and the air gets so used up and awful that bit by bit you lose track of any difference between his heaven and his hell and would gladly pick either over church.’

‘Vic Power, the Indians’ Negro first baseman, is the hitter. It’s weird to see a big black man like Power getting called an ‘Indian.’ Come to think of it, it’s pretty strange to see a bunch of white guys running around calling themselves ‘Indians’ too. How are real Indians supposed to feel about this? I mean, what if there was a team of white guys, with an Indian first baseman, called ‘the Cleveland Negroes’? It’d make exactly as much sense. Better yet, what if there was a team of Negroes and Indians called ‘the Cleveland White Guys’? I think a lot of pale-faced folks wouldn’t be all that thrilled.’

‘I give him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.’

‘And Bet, who spent a whole day making a Christmas card for Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane last year, then got so proud of the card that she refused to mail it to anybody but herself. ‘That’s the Christmas spirit!' Everett told her.’

‘Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.’

‘This A.M. bodily maintenance project was soon dubbed ‘the ABCDE.’ His mind was so adrift that the acronym’s meaning would change now and then, but generally it stood for something like ‘Another Brainless Clone’s Diet Effort’ or ‘Amorphous Blob Cooks Detritus for Evertt.’ What didn’t change much was the ritual itself: the ABCDE began with three boiled eggs, cooked sometimes too soft, sometimes too hard, almost never just right. Everett loathed overly soft eggs and he loathed overly hard ones, but since his A.M. mind couldn’t keep track of time without its morning coffee, and since coffee gave him heartburn on an empty stomach, he had to eat eggs before he could drink the coffee. So every morning he mistimed, miscooked and disliked them. He’d tried fried eggs for a while. But whenever he’d burnt them (which had been almost daily) he went through hell trying to clean his cast-iron skillet afterward. With boiled eggs, if the shells didn’t break (or what the heck, even if they did), the hot water for his coffee was ready just as soon as he spooned the eggs out and the pan was as good as clean as soon as the coffee got poured out into his cup. Clever. For an Amorphous Blob.

Everett drank drip coffee only. Percolated, cowboy or instant gave him even worse heartburn than drip, adding milk didn’t help, and Canadians hadn’t yet discovered the cappuccino and the like, so black drip it was. He also tried fixing toast to accompany the eggs now and then. Since he had no toaster he had to use his gas oven, and since he used it in the midst of his pre-coffee stupor, he usually burnt the toast to cinders. Even if he didn’t burn it he seldom ate it, because he didn’t like toast unless it was hot and served with coffee and he couldn’t have it with coffee yet, because his eggs were still boiling in his coffee water, and by the time he got the eggs shelled and salted and peppered the toast was stone cold. But he liked to make toast anyway, if only because by operating the gas oven in the midst of his pre-coffee stupor he daily stood a very real chance of dying.

Death. By all sorts of means. This was a topic Everett contemplated long, hard and none too carefully on these dank gray-hued late-winter mornings. Stumbling round the kitchen, not comprehending time, he would fix and consume his preposterous breakfast till the eggy coffee did its work and his literacy kicked in. Then he’d start to read whatever printed words or numbers his eyes lit upon. Not Russian novels; not books; not even magazines or newspapers. Thought, literature, informative writing of all kinds—these were for suckers. Because they all tried to give life meaning. But once your life had the acquired meaning, all it really meant was that you’d doomed yourself to hurt like a twice-hammered thumb once Unmeaning came along, as it always does, and knocked the teeth, brains and stuffing out of your puny meaning. All Everett required each morning, thank you, were some random household objects with a few meaningless words printed on the to add a little fuel to his contemplations of death...’

*Side note, if this book had a movie rating, it would be rated R for strong language and adult content, just in case you care about that kinda of thing...