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.
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