David James Duncan. The Brothers K. New York: Random, 2005. E-book.
The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy’s murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.
Lance MorrowWe love the game. We’re having fun. We’re serious. We’re seriously having fun. You can take a professional team that is having fun and is serious about it, that’s another level.
Mike Timlin, Pitcher, Boston Red Sox 2004The umpire doesn’t say “Work ball!”
Willie Stargell, Hall of Famer, Pittsburgh Pirates
Yes, The Brothers K is vaguely an hommage to Dostoevsky’s famous novel, but the four brothers’ last names do not even begin with K. They are the Chance brothers: Everett, Irwin, Peter, and Kincaid, the narrator. Perhaps that is just as an appropriate name. At one point in the novel, though, we are given thirteen definitions of K, one of them being the symbol for a strikeout in baseball.
The Brothers K is a novel about baseball and how we Americans are still trying to figure out what happened to us in the sixties. The baseball portrayed is the difficult minor league ball, similar in approach to the fiction of Frank O’Rourke. The father of the four sons and younger twin daughters Bet and Freddy is a minor league player and coach. (Freddy’s real name is Winifred, but they already called Irwin “Winnie” when she was born.)
We start off with the boys watching baseball in the late fifties and early sixties, dropping the names of some of the players. Their father is an excellent commentator because he was an up and coming minor league pitcher. The observations about Roger Maris are especially thought-provoking.
Kincaid got his name from the city in Oklahoma where he was born while his father was playing ball there. They now reside in Washington State near Portland, Oregon. Mr. Chance no longer pitches because he crushed his left thumb (his pitching hand) in a machine at the lumber mill where he works.
Most of the story, though, take place between 1968 and 1973 when the brothers are in high school and college and the army. None of them handle the social changes particularly well. Kincaid (“Cade”) does OK, I guess, because he learns from his older brothers.
Everett becomes the campus radical. His column in the Washington State student newspaper is called Give Chance a Peace. He totes the bullhorn at demonstrations. He debates his history professor on revolutions. He also falls for Natasha, a Goldwater supporter who challenges his thinking. He will avoid the draft by going to British Columbia, Canada. He eventually has to make some serious decisions concerning his family, his country, and his girlfriend.
Everett is also the one who gets his father to try an experimental operation to replace his missing thumb with his big toe. He later contacts a baseball scout who talks Mr. Chance into becoming a relief pitcher and coach for the Portland minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. (Readers may recognize this time period when the Pirates were in a couple of World Series.) Mr. Chance succeeds as a coach because he still plays once in a while, and he shows the younger players how to have fun.
Everett helps his family but questions authority. He grouses about a ninth grade English teacher and gets into a debate with one of his college professors. He openly defies Elder Babcock, the pastor of the church his mother attends with all of her children. Eventually, all the boys except for Irwin drop out of church when their father allows it. (There is a lot behind that: there is a section of the book called “The Psalm Wars” when the religious incompatibility comes to a head.)
For much of the book, Mrs. Chance comes across as a one-dimensional religious fanatic, but near the end we see and understand her much more richly. Her faith may bring some division (see Matthew 10:34-36) but it also provides a foundation for her during nearly impossible times. As the story concludes we learn more about her and understand her love for God and her loyalty to the strict Seventh-Day Adventist group to which she belongs.
Peter is the intellectual. He is always reading. He questions his mother’s faith, goes to Harvard, begins practicing Buddhism and starts down a scholarly road which will take him to India, where he learns things he could never learn in the sheltered West.
Irwin is the peacemaker. He loves church and earns awards for attendance and Bible memorization. He also is the most attractive brother and as a teen the girls fall for him. (Not that any of the boys have too much difficulty in that department. Each responds to the sexual revolution in his own way.)
Alas, when he is drafted, he thinks he can be the same way in the Army. He ends up being falsely diagnosed with mental illness and is practically killed in a military insane asylum. As many tortured Christians have done through the ages, he recites Bible verses and sings religious songs, which only increases the torture. After all, didn’t Freud teach that religious belief was a neurosis?
While Irwin’s story is harrowing, it is based on real events. Around the same time Irwin’s tale takes place, a classmate of mine at Harvard was given similar psychiatric treatments there. Although I did not know him personally at the school, everyone knew who he was. He was an angry campus radical. I knew him about six to ten years later, and he was a shell of his former self, in and out of the local mental hospital. I am sure that illicit drugs contributed, but so did the prescribed drugs and the shock treatments he received from the university.
Just this week there was an article in the local newspaper about a former Yale student suing that school for giving him shock treatments and other psychological “care.” Sadly, things have not changed much. The sixties made people crazy and some of those in authority still are.
Historically, men from Irwin’s church have been conscientious objectors in American wars. They either get a deferment or get drafted as medics. If anyone has seen Hacksaw Ridge, the medic Desmond Doss was an Adventist. Irwin does what he thinks is right and what is God’s will and gets into an intolerable situation. But the novel is not merely an antiwar screed. The debate between Everett and the professor is presented in an evenhanded way. We see that the real issue with many of the protestors was not the war but bringing a radical revolution to America.
The novel notes that the Vietnam war was foolish not only because of the domino theory but because the soldiers were “ordered not to win.” It really is a parallel to the minor league teams in the story. If a minor league team starts winning, it usually gets broken up—its best players are promoted or traded, or both.
Kade does not tell too much about himself. He is the recorder who goes with the flow. He lets Everett do the talking, Peter the exploring, and Irwin the loving (at least till he cannot love any more).
The Brothers K in places is a work of striking genius. There are chapters that make the reading completely worthwhile. Like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, the dream of the germs in Crime and Punishment, Stepan’s confession in The Possessed, or even the painting of the known world in Jones’ The Known World, certain parts of The Brothers K sing. Everett’s “avant garde” play Hats is a pointed commentary on the sixties—instead of germs, they are East-West party hats. Oh, and there’s T-Bar’s rant about how hippies will turn into yuppies. (T-Bar is a San Francisco cowboy Peter meets in India.)
Kade accurately notes that “the sixties” decade really lasted from 1963 to 1973. Like the Morrow quotation above, he starts the decade with Kennedy’s assassination. Yet as the book 1963: The Year of Revolution suggests, it was already going on before November 22. Indeed, I would argue that the killing of Kennedy was the first major evil effect, at least in America, that began back in May when a benighted Supreme Court rewrote the First Amendment to mean what Article 124 of Stalin’s Constitution of the Soviet Union says. Our nation has been struggling with that misinterpretation ever since.
The discussion between Everett and his professor about revolutions (the professor sounds like he knows Crane Brinton and Wolfgang Leonhard) is like a twentieth-century update of The Possessed. Everett’s letter to Kade about his dream eloquently echoes Raskolnikov’s dream—no germs!—and is perhaps a sign that even radical Everett is ready for a heart change that is more significant than a political revolution.
I had to laugh at Kade’s name for the SDS, the sixties student radical group: Suckers for a Dumb Slogan. Now they call themselves progressives, which is the same term Leonhard’s Communist bosses used in the forties.
The Brothers K is not a knee-jerk reaction or encapsulation of the sixties. Each of three brothers (narrator Kade stays in the background) acts on what he believes in, but each seems to discover that his beliefs only carry him so far. Maybe the Beatles and the Beatniks found inner peace when they went to India, for example, but Peter Chance discovers something else.
Like The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov (and Robinson Crusoe, for that matter), The Brothers K asks about evil, “Why doesn’t God ever try to stop it?” Yet the default God for much of the story is represented by the legalistic elder Babcock who leads Mrs. Chance’s Seventh Day Adventist congregation.
Some of the church people like the elder are caricatures. Perhaps the author chose the SDAs because they are stricter than most Christian groups about following Old Testament laws; for example, they meet on Saturdays, avoid any sports on Saturdays, and observe most of the Jewish dietary laws. It seems that their view of salvation includes a lot of dos and don’ts. As one friend characterized it to me, “The way to God’s heart is through my stomach?” Yet, we meet some other SDA leaders later in the story and begin to realize they are not all such pulpit-pounding judges.
The father and three of the brothers each in his own way oppose this God, but let us just say, there is redemption. Perhaps, as is often the case in the real world, the most loyal Christian becomes the most persecuted. Maybe God “doesn’t stop it,” but He has a way of redeeming it.
I have two minor quibbles with the book. It mentions a submarine named Liberty. There may be something symbolic in that name, but most submarines are named for fish; many of the newer ones are named after famous Americans (George Washington to Kamehameha) or cities (such as Los Angeles).
In presenting the SDA strictness, elder Babcock’s congregation is frequently warned about hell. Yet the Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine of hell is not the usual Christian hell that we see in most Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theologies. SDAs are annihilationists, that is, hell is not a place of eternal punishment, but a place where souls are destroyed. Only the saved live eternally; the lost cease to exist. Burning up in a fire is no doubt unpleasant, but it sounds like it would be of a short duration. I wonder if the recurring references to hell is simply part of the “fundamentalist” caricature.
The Brothers K is a fascinating book on different levels. It has a lot about baseball, a lot about family cohesion and conflict, and ultimately a gentle appreciation for the life lived well with the possibility always of redemption. It is wacky and really pretty wonderful. (Centrifuging Red-Shafted Flickers?) As Shakespeare would say, it has scope.