The Brothers [Paperback]

Frederick Barthelme (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2001

After Del Tribute almost sleeps with his brother's sexually edgy wife, The Brothers sets out to trace and detail the intricate pattern of consequences of this near indiscretion. Del and Bud, two brothers whose middle-aged adolescent antics have a way of messing up each other's lives, both confront the bittersweet comfort of having too many choices. In a remarkable performance that extends the territory of Barthelme's fiction, the love and desire of these brothers is laid open, explored, and experienced.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This funny, understated and ruminative novel about the vexed relationship of two middle-aged brothers reflects the author's familiar interest in marital strife and midlife depression.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Del, who used to do p.r. work in Houston, is given a condo in Biloxi, Mississippi, by his grateful ex-father-in-law after Del divorces the man's daughter. Biloxi happens to be home-base for Del's college-teacher brother Bud, too--plus Bud's attractive and level wife Margaret. When Del arrives in Biloxi, though, it's to find Bud gone to California in a spasm of the midlife crisis he's continually having. Del and Margaret keep each other company a little too well--just skirting treachery--and Del's hangover from this continues when Bud returns and proceeds to hold the indiscretion over him. Meanwhile, Del has found the much-younger and quite weird Jen (she publishes a free sheet of gruesome oddities taken off the CompuServe newslines)--and with her help tries to negotiate life with a quite desperate brother, an ambivalent sister-in-law, and Del's own bred-in-the-bone velleity. Small-time academics and a visit by a priest who'd like to chuck his collar don't help to firm up anyone's life-vision--funny, scathing portraiture. Barthelme (Natural Selection, 1990, etc.) writes with exceptional beauty about what Biloxi looks, smells, tastes, and sounds like--its tawdry but lovely gulfside edge--and there is to the characters' confusions and shamblings a new fine melancholy never before quite as codified in Barthelme's fictional world: depressive Bud at one point tells Del, apropos USA Today, that ``People who are supposed to be removed from what's going on, well, they're all part of it now. Everything that could possibly go wrong has already gone wrong, and now it's going wrong even more.'' This finished-fug suggests a redemption of the failed and gives the book hope and some shape. Not much, but enough to make the utterly fantastical image that ends the book--Del as a half-joke wrapping Bud in gauze and foil and leading him out to the condo's balcony for a while--take on indelibility. One of Barthelme's more haunting novels. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1st Counterpoint pbk. ed edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431302
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431307
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,372,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frederick Barthelme is author of sixteen books including Moon Deluxe, Second Marriage, Tracer, Two Against One, Natural Selection, The Brothers, Painted Desert, and Bob the Gambler. He is an occasional contributor toThe New Yorker and has published in GQ, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, Frank, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven. A retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages, was published by Counterpoint. His novel, Elroy Nights, was published in 2003 by Counterpoint, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. His new novel, Waveland, is from Doubleday.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Keeper from Frederick Barthelme, May 30, 2005

By 

Quin - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brothers (Paperback)

"They left the hotel at three the next afternoon. Jen was driving, Bud and Margaret were in the back. They took a turn bt the beach long enough for a last look, then slipped back up to I-10 and headed west toward Mobile. They were riding alongside an eighteen-wheel truck that had big lemons and limes painted on its side. The traffic was surprisingly heavy, Jen pulled in behind the truck and hit the cruise control. "I'm just following this guy," she said. "Wherever he goes." (128)

This paragraph from half way through the novel serves as a good example of the forward momentum of Frederick Barthelme's narrative. Perhaps `momentum' isn't the right word, as the direction hardly seems driven by forces originating in the past. I can't think of a novel in which past, certainly fate, plays so small a role. Does Fate exist in Barthelme's cosmos? Not much would seem to be more ripe for a depiction of destiny working its strange power than the relationship between brothers (inviting as it can a veritable mess of power struggles and envy, not to mention mythic analogies reaching into the archaic past), and yet Del and Bud here experience less of this than one would have thought dramatically interesting, for all their problems. Actually, `The Brothers', really isn't all that dramatically interesting, but what is compelling is one of the most detailed descriptions of the `new South' that out-Percys Percy, where Gas-mart attendants have bellies the size of cash registers and Kmart and Audio Instinct are more prevalent than plantations.

`The Brothers' is actually a little lopsided as titles go, as all the action is centered around Del, who has just moved to Biloxi following a divorce that took place just before the novel begins. Considering the conflict that is one of the main threads of the novel (even `thread' seems too substantial), Del and Bud seem anxious to help one another. Bud tries to get Del a more respectable job at his community college. Del tries to help Bud out with his mood swings. They act, not to put to fine a point on it, brotherly.

If anything, the friction between Del and the other characters exist as a series of foils for the central relationship between the brothers, which is mysterious enough to resist an easy description of conflict, if not conflict itself. About two thirds of the way through the novel there is a minor incident between Del and his girlfriend involving a knife. Was it an accident, or wasn't it really aggression disguised as an accident? Probably Not, everyone decides - Del, the girlfriend, and perhaps even the narrator - just an accident. Nobody can say for sure, so we just won't bother to say at all. But the injury itself is real, and remains.

Society is no help. A barbecue turns into petty match of egos, simultaneously stunted and monstrous, a road trip brings everybody back to right where they started. Religion isn't what it used to be; now priests are on the lamb to shack up with girlfriends like everybody else, and trying to break into the gambling business to boot. Del and Jen play at confession, and as a result religion seems less mocked than resurrected in some strange new form. Del prays the prayers of his childhood, but of course he isn't a child anymore. Or perhaps prayer given him, at least for a moment, a child's perspective.

There are injuries of many kinds in this novel. Between husband and wife, between colleagues, between strangers and between loved ones, including, of course, brother and brother. The final scene is a funny, endearing example of the power of love and imagination, maybe love as imagination, to heal those injuries.

1.0 out of 5 stars Blithering inanity, September 13, 2008

By 

Steven V. Owen (Healdsburg, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Brothers (Paperback)

This book, like most fictions, is about personalities and social interactions. There is no requirement that an author create likeable personalities or nice interactions, and Barthelme demonstrates that here. Actually, he has gone out of his way to create disagreeable characters, chronically drifting and unskilled. The dialog is banal and jittery, reflecting speakers' shallowness and irrelevance. Characters talk past--not to--each other.

Sequences are unpredictable and implausible, as though lives are completely out of personal control. Needing a plotline? Invent your own. If you are looking for existential anomie, this may satisfy you, although you might save some time by just reading a bunch of newspaper classified ads.