preview

Analysis Of The Brothers K

Decent Essays

THE BROTHERS K By David James Duncan. 645 pp. New York: Doubleday.

THE 19th-century Russian novel has been born again in "The Brothers K," David James Duncan's wildly excessive, flamboyantly sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-slapping homage to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy -- and the game of baseball.

For the title isn't merely a spin on "The Brothers Karamazov," though Mr. Duncan makes frequent references to that heavy tome. "K," we are reminded, is also the baseball-scorecard symbol for striking out -- and thus, as Mr. Duncan extrapolates it, for failing, flunking, pratfalling, making a bad situation even worse. But it can have a positive side as well. "To lose your very self for the sake of another," he adds, "is . . . the only way you're ever going to save it."

The strikeout kids are the brothers Chance, four boys of the baby-boom generation born to Hugh Chance, a worldly-wise and weary fastball-slinging minor-league pitcher, and Laura, Hugh's staunchly conservative Seventh-day Adventist wife. Kincaid, the novel's principal narrator; his brothers, Everett, Irwin and Peter, and their twin sisters, Beatrice and Winifred, grow up in Camas, Wash., a working-class town where Hugh supplements his meager baseball salary by working at the local paper mill.

Everyone believes that Papa Chance is destined for the big leagues -- until an accident at the mill crushes the thumb on his pitching hand. Laura declares that this, like all tragedies, is God's will, and that nothing can be done to make it better. The family settles for a life of noisy desperation until a foulmouthed surgeon offers to repair the injured thumb with bones from Papa's toe. Thus Hugh Chance is reborn as his team's pitching coach and "stupid situation reliever," known, of course, as Papa Toe.

For a while, the national pastime, seen on television and from rump-punishing bleachers far from the bright lights of the major leagues, becomes a complex metaphor for all that Papa Chance and his sons hold sacred. Everett, the eldest, even goes so far as to mark the beginning of the turbulent 60's not with the Kennedy assassination or the arrival of the Beatles but with the day Roger Maris became "the assassin of a legend," hitting 61 home runs and breaking Babe

Get Access