The Brothers Karamazov Book Review New York Times
Compression-Hitting for Dostoyevsky
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June 28, 1992
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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 simply a spin on "The Brothers Karamazov," though Mr. Duncan makes frequent references to that heavy tome. "One thousand," 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 manner you're ever going to save it."
The strikeout kids are the brothers Gamble, 4 boys of the baby-boom generation born to Hugh Chance, a worldly-wise and weary fastball-slinging minor-league bullpen, and Laura, Hugh'southward staunchly conservative Seventh-day Adventist wife. Kincaid, the novel's chief narrator; his brothers, Everett, Irwin and Peter, and their twin sisters, Beatrice and Winifred, grow up in Camas, Wash., a working-course town where Hugh supplements his meager baseball salary by working at the local paper manufactory.
Everyone believes that Papa Chance is destined for the big leagues -- until an accident at the factory crushes the pollex on his pitching hand. Laura declares that this, like all tragedies, is God's will, and that zip can be done to go far 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 class, every bit Papa Toe.
For a while, the national pastime, seen on tv set and from rump-punishing bleachers far from the vivid 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 bump-off or the inflow of the Beatles but with the day Roger Maris became "the assassinator of a legend," hitting 61 home runs and breaking Baby Ruth'due south single-season record.
But the family romance with baseball fades a chip every bit the brothers mature. In a manner like to Dostoyevsky's manipulation of the Karamazovs, Mr. Duncan's Hazard brothers become representative types of America's countercultural youth, whose passions, he suggests with oversimplified hindsight, were due more to spiritual uncertainty than to politics, the Vietnam War or that famed hedonistic trio -- sex activity, drugs and rock-and-ringlet.
Everett declares himself an atheist and becomes a long-haired campus radical, eventually fleeing to Canada to escape the draft. Peter, the family intellectual, embraces Eastern mysticism and departs for Republic of india to written report obscure religious texts. Irwin, who clings to his mother's rigorous faith, trusts blindly that God will protect him when he is drafted and sent to Vietnam. And Kincaid, who escapes the armed forces because of an eye injury, tries to hold an increasingly estranged family together as he sees his older brothers venture out into the world across Camas.
Afterward taking a swipe at the sentimental, up-from-despair endings of Frank Capra movies, Mr. Duncan delivers a more than drawn-out but no less crowd-pleasing conclusion. Along the way we are shown that evil exists in the world to brand more proficient, that villains are needed to bring out the heroic in common men and that faith in some kind of divine presence lies at the terminate of all quests, whether or not nosotros are aware that nosotros are questing.
Those who have lived through, perhaps even inhaled, the intoxicating fervor of the 1960's and early seventy's will delight in Mr. Duncan's flip wisdom and menstruation nostalgia. The pages of "The Brothers Thou" sparkle with puns and jokes, with tie-dyed references to popular civilization. And they're tinged with Mr. Duncan'southward steadfastly romantic view of baseball and its thankless, gritty subcontract-squad excursion.
Notwithstanding, one can't help noticing that Mr. Duncan'due south endeavor to define the secular passions of the era in spiritual terms avoids 2 major movements: ceremonious rights and feminism. Blacks are inappreciably seen or heard in this book and, with the exception of proud, suffering Laura Adventure, women surface mostly as incomplete characters content to exist the objects -- or victims -- of male person want.
Mr. Duncan'southward starting time novel, "The River Why," celebrated and satirized the Emersonian quest for mystical transcendence in fly line-fishing. "The Brothers 1000," published almost a decade subsequently, goes further to plumb America's soul, trying to find common ground betwixt the rigid fundamentalism of the religious right and the feckless, become-with-the-flow spirituality of the counter culture.
In trying to justify the ways of God to man, fathers to sons, sinners to saints, the U.s.a. to Vietnam and baseball to everything under the sun, Mr. Duncan seems a trifle overambitious. And this, along with his tendency to sermonize, leads him away from his book's truthful strength: his warm, unabashedly sentimental celebration of the American family unit. As individuals, the Chances may exist strikeouts. But as a family, they tin survive the stolen bases, spitballs and dumb luck that proceed life, and the national pastime, interesting. In "The Brothers K," this message lands with the loud, confident smack of a high fly brawl caught in an outfielder'south glove. I leaves Mr. Duncan'due south stadium with a happy glow. 'Grand' IS FOR FAILURE
David James Duncan had been working on his 2d novel for two years when he happened to reread "The Brothers Karamazov." "I institute at that place were a lot of parallels," he said in a contempo telephone interview from his home in Portland, Ore. "In that location's an inquisition scene of sorts, an exile, a murder scene, a public scandal." He decided to call his own novel "The Brothers 1000," and use it "to poke fun at the similarities."
"Only the master thing I was thinking," he added, explaining the book'southward championship, "is the baseball game statistician's lingo. A 'G' is a strikeout, which is a personal failure. I love the fact that a man who is considered a success in baseball game has a 30 percent success rate -- in other words, a seventy percent failure rate."
Like Hugh Gamble in the novel, Mr. Duncan's male parent was a pitcher. "He was an outstanding city-league softball pitcher. He batted well-nigh .500 every year." Similar Peter, 1 of Hugh Take a chance's sons, Mr. Duncan studied Eastern religions. But unlike Irwin, the youngest, he did not get to Vietnam.
"I was spared that one by a loftier lottery number," he recalled. "I was actually a fruitarian at the time and was planning to escape the draft past being underweight."
Also like the Take chances children, Mr. Duncan, who is 40 years erstwhile, was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist religion. "I knew I was going to take on the fundamentalist upbringing," he said. "It feels natural to me to waffle betwixt extreme reverence and extreme irreverence -- and nothing makes me feel less reverent than a church." -- SUSANNAH HUNNEWELL
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/books/pinch-hitting-for-dostoyevsky.html
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