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	• The Brothers K David James Duncan Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1996 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 117 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Chances struggle with issues of religion, humanity, love, life, and death throughout the novel - themes that are always relevant. While the story focuses on the Chance brothers, Duncan has a way of giving each character a distinctive personality and voice all masterfully led by youngest brother Kincaid, who narrates the saga. THE BROTHERS K is a masterfully crafted story that is funny, tragic and hopeful. After 645 pages, I had fallen in love with the Chance family - each and every one of them - and was sad to say goodbye.

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Converted to Baseball

I was never a fan of baseball until I read David James Duncan's The Brothers K. However, this is a story that is not just about a sport, but an extraordinary family of four brothers, twin sisters, a 7th Day Adventist mother, and a father who had to forego his dream of pitching to provide for his family. What sets this novel apart aside from the wonderful characters, is the author's ability to weave a good yarn. Anyone familiar with John Irving's a Widow for One Year or The World According to Garp will adore this book. It charts the course of a family through a lifetime of ups and downs, pain and growth. Read it! It may be long, but every page is worth it.

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A Chance encounter you'll remember.

David James Duncan is a Montana writer. I arrived at THE BROTHERS K after first reading his RIVER WHY (1988) and MY STORY AS TOLD BY WATER (2001). "I only know that the one thing, perhaps the only thing we can always be certain of," one of Duncan's unforgettable characters observes in THE BROTHERS K, "is that our lives will turn out very differently, and much more darkly, than most of us ever dream as children" (p. 214). Grandawma's insight maps the course of Duncan's poignant novel, which is perhaps similar to Dostoevsky's 1880 Russian classic only in its epic length (645 pages), and in its larger themes of war and peace, crime and punishment, and love, family and death that run through it. Okay, and there's also a goat named "Chekov."

Set mostly in Camas, Washington, Duncan's poignant novel follows the memorable Chance family through three decades, the 1950s through the 1970s, and around the world to Vietnam, Canada, and India. Along the way, the Chance siblings (four precocious brothers and their twin sisters) establish their independence from their parents, Papa Hugh, a talented bush-league pitcher with a toe for a thumb, and Mama Laura, a devout Adventist with a painful secret in her past. Through Kincaid Chance's narrative, we also follow the lives of his brothers, Everett, a draft dodger, Peter, "a scholar monk" (p. 414), and Irwin, a gentle, Christian foot soldier. At one point in the novel, Kincaid finds his family rallying together, "headed for an insane asylum in California. We looked more as if we'd escaped from one. But in the pouring gray rain, I felt clarity. With the war still raging, I felt at peace. With Papa in despair, Everett in prison and Irwin in the asylum, I felt release. I didn't understand my feelings, didn't even desire them, really, but they kept filling me so full that my eyes began to well" (p. 564). THE BROTHERS K is a novel about crash landing in a good place (p. 398), and a novel you won't soon forget.

G. Merritt

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