Among siblings and strangers
By Sylvia Brownrigg |
April 28, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
STORIES of marital relations - strained, destroyed or restored - surely take up a larger section of our fiction shelves than stories of brothers and sisters. Yet why should that be, given the deep imprint siblings can make? Staying intimate with one's spouse is a challenge, certainly, but the problems posed by a difficult brother or sister can be just as painful.
In Elizabeth Strout's fluid and compassionate new novel, "The Burgess Boys," her first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Olive Kittredge," the connections among Jim Burgess and his younger twin brother and sister, Bob and Susan, are central to the story. That the marriages of these adult siblings are either over or in a rocky state is kept in the background of a narrative primarily concerned with the affinities and enmities played out among these three during a family crisis.
At the start of the novel, the "boys" happen to be together in Brooklyn, where both live, when Jim receives a desperate call from their sister. A sour, divorced optometrist, Susan still lives in Maine, where they were all raised, with her 19-year-old son, Zach, and an elderly female lodger. Zach has gotten into some serious trouble.
Shirley Falls, a depressed former mill town with a substantial influx of Somali refugees, was also the setting of Strout's first novel, "Amy and Isabelle." Susan's son, a shy, friendless boy who works at the local Walmart, has thrown a frozen pig's head through the door of a local Somali mosque - "During prayer. During Ramadan." It was, he explains, just "a dumb joke." The boy will be arrested and, in a community fraught with new racial tensions, may well be prosecuted for committing a hate crime. His two uncles - Jim, an extremely successful and famous defense lawyer at a high-end Manhattan firm, and Bob, a die-hard liberal who works for the legal aid society - offer to help steer him and his mother through the catastrophe.
If Bob is the book's conscience, Jim is its operator, though the perspective also shifts to include Jim's patient, proper Connecticut-born wife and Bob's ex-wife, who illuminate other sides of the Burgess boys. Bob is the main source of empathy for the Somali refugees, though Strout attempts to give broad scope to the difficulties of merging two diverse and beleaguered populations.
The Somalis struggle with displacement in scattered scenes that Strout sets within that community. Can these traumatized families find a place in the United States, specifically in the rugged, unforgiving countryside of Maine? At what cost to their sense of selves, or of home?
Strout handles her storytelling with grace, intelligence and low-key humor, demonstrating a great ear for the many registers in which people speak to their loved ones.
If there's a weakness here, it's Zach, offstage for much of the action in spite of being the catalyst for it. He may be hollow, but he seems a basically nice kid, a teenager who doesn't appear to possess the kind of hatred (or, frankly, imagination) required for the pig's head stunt.
Perhaps Strout's point is that an act of aggression against strangers will be sternly addressed by our legal system, flawed though it may be, while hostilities against one's own flesh and blood are more in the ordinary run of things. These disputes must be worked out privately, in the homes and corridors of family life.
In Elizabeth Strout's fluid and compassionate new novel, "The Burgess Boys," her first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Olive Kittredge," the connections among Jim Burgess and his younger twin brother and sister, Bob and Susan, are central to the story. That the marriages of these adult siblings are either over or in a rocky state is kept in the background of a narrative primarily concerned with the affinities and enmities played out among these three during a family crisis.
At the start of the novel, the "boys" happen to be together in Brooklyn, where both live, when Jim receives a desperate call from their sister. A sour, divorced optometrist, Susan still lives in Maine, where they were all raised, with her 19-year-old son, Zach, and an elderly female lodger. Zach has gotten into some serious trouble.
Shirley Falls, a depressed former mill town with a substantial influx of Somali refugees, was also the setting of Strout's first novel, "Amy and Isabelle." Susan's son, a shy, friendless boy who works at the local Walmart, has thrown a frozen pig's head through the door of a local Somali mosque - "During prayer. During Ramadan." It was, he explains, just "a dumb joke." The boy will be arrested and, in a community fraught with new racial tensions, may well be prosecuted for committing a hate crime. His two uncles - Jim, an extremely successful and famous defense lawyer at a high-end Manhattan firm, and Bob, a die-hard liberal who works for the legal aid society - offer to help steer him and his mother through the catastrophe.
If Bob is the book's conscience, Jim is its operator, though the perspective also shifts to include Jim's patient, proper Connecticut-born wife and Bob's ex-wife, who illuminate other sides of the Burgess boys. Bob is the main source of empathy for the Somali refugees, though Strout attempts to give broad scope to the difficulties of merging two diverse and beleaguered populations.
The Somalis struggle with displacement in scattered scenes that Strout sets within that community. Can these traumatized families find a place in the United States, specifically in the rugged, unforgiving countryside of Maine? At what cost to their sense of selves, or of home?
Strout handles her storytelling with grace, intelligence and low-key humor, demonstrating a great ear for the many registers in which people speak to their loved ones.
If there's a weakness here, it's Zach, offstage for much of the action in spite of being the catalyst for it. He may be hollow, but he seems a basically nice kid, a teenager who doesn't appear to possess the kind of hatred (or, frankly, imagination) required for the pig's head stunt.
Perhaps Strout's point is that an act of aggression against strangers will be sternly addressed by our legal system, flawed though it may be, while hostilities against one's own flesh and blood are more in the ordinary run of things. These disputes must be worked out privately, in the homes and corridors of family life.
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