Four brothers, twin sisters, a father with minor league baseball in his blood, and a Bible thumping mother form the story skeleton of The Brothers K. David James Duncan packs a lot of meat on these bones in his very long, very elaborate, quasi-biographical novel of the Chance family of Camas, Washington.

As I explain in my full review on Rose City Reader, I have some problems with this book, although I enjoyed it overall. For one thing, the pacing of the first half is so slow, while the pacing of the second half is a roller coaster ride—the contrast was jarring. Also, Duncan’s style gets to be too much for me. He is just too relentlessly clever and self-aware. There is too much frosting to get through to get to the cake.

The Brothers K is one of the best books I’ve ever read. This is the deceptively complex story of an American family. A mother, father, four sons, and two daughters, growing up in the 50s and 60s. Their childhoods shaped by the family’s two passions: baseball and religion. Their adulthoods shaped by the family’s own small bundle of insecurities and conflicts, and the overwhelming nightmare of Vietnam. I’m a Canadian agnostic who doesn’t like baseball, and I loved it. The story is brutally honest and unflinchingly real: sprawling, heartbreaking, touching. David James Duncan isn’t afraid to show all the sides of the characters, even the ones that if they were real people they’d try to hide from the world. The characters change and grow as the novel goes on, and the story is both epic and personal, just like the story of any family. The way he uses language is remarkable: at times, he effortly strings together words that create a sentence that would be flawed if even one word was replaced by a synonym. I loved The Brothers K and think it should be more readily available in bookstores and libraries, but since it’s not (at least where I’m from it’s not), you owe it to yourself to track it down and read it. It’s a rewarding experience.

This is absolutely the best book I have ever read.

The Brothers K is the best book I have ever read. It’s long, but I breezed through it in about 3 weeks, I just couldn’t put it down! The characters and their stories were so engaging and I really grew to love them by page 10. I often found myself laughing out loud on one page, and crying on the next. EVERYONE should read this book.

This past Christmas my grandmother gave me the book The Brothers K by David James Duncan. I haven’t written about it on here yet, but were it not for Tom Robbins and his lovable characters in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, I am pretty sure The Brothers K would have been my favorite book of 2005.

In particular, there is one scene that I can’t seem to shake. The father of the family – a former up and coming minor league baseball player until a work-related accident forced his premature retirement – was explaining to his son about strike zones. Actually, he was showing his son, Kade, how to paint a strike zone on an old matress to serve as a practice target for a pitching mound he constructed behind the house.

Kade was surprised when his father – rather than painting a carefully measured geometric shape – began slapping paint haphazardly on the mattress with aggressive slaps of the brush. His father explained [and I paraphrase]:

Kade, the first thing to know is that a strike zone doesn’t exist. Only strike zones exist. And it’s not what’s between the batter’s knees and shoulders. Strike zones are in the ump’s head. That’s what you gotta figure out. I could stand out here all day throwing balls at a black rectangle and it wouldn’t mean the damndest thing ‘cause I don’t know who’s looking.

The metaphor is obvious and is carried throughout the book: our success in life isn’t judged by some objective strike zone. No. Our success is judged by those who watch us and those who judge us. And maybe most importantly, those who we let judge us.

I struggled through the first 100 pages, then got hooked. I loved, loved this book.