Customer Reviews

LAST COMES THE EGG: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm Bruce Duffy's daughter. Many people found this book to be a "dissapointment" and have racial slurs, and just be a "weird" novel. What no one realizes is that although exaggerated, some of these events actually happened. Its such a raw, real book. My Dad wrote something for himself, hes been through so much emotional childhood pain and this book was a release. He didn't care much what anyone thought of it. It was mainly for him, a sort of therapy. I think that it was quite brave of him to write a book and not focus on whether or not it would be comparable to "The World As I Found It." If he had gotten caught up in that, it wouldn't have been literature, simply a fake attempt at depth and masterpeice. I found this book, because of the motives behind it (and I won't lie...because I understood it better than his first novel, seeing as I am 15) to be much more profound than any "classic" contrived novel.

--Lily Duffy

The World As I Found It (Duffy's first book) was a strong, irresistable book, which got behind you and pushed you headlong through the story of an opaque philosopher. It was great, and I wondered how Duffy could follow it. Last Comes the Egg could easily have been titled The World As I Found It too, but what a different world it is. Gone are the lofty havens of great thinkers, the vaulting halls of Cambridge and the battlefields of Europe. Instead we have suburban Maryland in the sixties, a place coming from nowhere, and not going to anywhere either. And in place of the sheer power, we have a very subtle, quiet story, which opens itself up to be explored.

The story all happens in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, in a middle-class neighborhood of nobody in particular. Into this life of complete unimportance are thrust the children, who, like their parents, cannot accept their own insignificance, and struggle to find a place of importance in a world that is indifferent to them. In a very different journey of discovery, these children seek in themselves to find who they are, even as they look around them to discover what role, what performance other people like best. And in this microcosm of identity and conformity, the attentive reader will find pieces of himself (and herself) scattered around. And hopefully they will come away with a better understanding.

I found the book tremendously rewarding, and a powerful window on adolescence in America. Duffy aims for and hits the real heart of the end of childhood, and brings out what everyone feels as they teeter on the edge of adulthood - "Wait - I thought there was something more..." In the emptiness of real life, we are shown how everyone finds something to latch onto, to call important, to be their own special illusion. We make ourselves into heroes, protecting our precious, fragile eggs, until some few of us find the strength to let it fall.

Reading this book reminds me of growing up in the 60's... particulary how weird it was visiting other kid's houses. At that age, I pretty much thought the rest of the world lived the same way I did (compulsively clean Mom), so it was like visiting a foreign country when I'd see other kids bedrooms, and smell the differences between my house and their house.

I hadn't really thought about stuff like that for 20 years... and reading this book brought it all back home. Very, very enjoyable and very, very funny (but tragic-fun... the best kind).

Bruce Duffy has written a sensitive book of great depth. The loss of his mother, Joan, and the painful tale of Frank and his father, John, trying to survive the agony of cataclysm, and, in the process, further fracturing an already splintered relationship, makes for an unusually compelling story. I cried for the twelve-year old Frank in the loneliness of his Kensington suburb. I know comparisons are odious, but Holden Caulfield has a serious rival in Frank Dougherty

I would have enjoyed the book more if I had not known that the author received a Guggenheim and several other prestigious writing awards, and if he had not been compared to JD Salinger on the back cover blurb. I received the book as a gift, and have not read his first one which is highly acclaimed. So I understand his daughter's frustration with the criticism, but if someone that highly acclaimed decides to write and publish a book "just for himself," without giving the attention to plot and narrative that one would expect from someone of his highly touted stature, people who take the time to read it are going to be disappointed. And they will certainly be less likely to read his other book(s).

Indeed, it did seem as though Mr. Duffy consciously set out to recreate "Catcher in the Rye" in the late 60s - early 70s. Thus, the roaming around, the urgently disappointing sex, even the attempts at metaphor all sound contrived, as if they were simply efforts to hit all of the score points in Catcher. The emulation of Salinger also undermines the concept that the book fails because it was "a book for himself." The book fails because the author fell prey to one of the key failings of budding authors - thinking that his own childhood is so interesting that just putting it into words will charm the reader. There's a reason why the most popular memoirs usually turn out to be fake.

The concept of the "egg" was interesting, but it had no organic relationship to the characters in the narrative. Yes, all of the events were connected with loss of innocence and coming of age, but don't forget: WE ALL DO THAT. Or did it at some point in our lives. And we all (or most of us) had strange things happen during our adolescence. For example, Alvy shot a dog and put it in the trunk. The two white boys had an ambivalent black sidekick who sees his mom's grave. They get "saved" by an elderly black couple. Race was a huge big deal back then, but it's another story and another book or two. What do any of these things have to do with the sole emotionally gripping factor in the narrative - Frank's loss of his mother and his eventual finding out (ambiguously) that he was a child of incest between his mother and brother, and that his dad wasn't really his dad at all. That would have been a heck of a story. And if it did really happen to the author, a wrenchingly hard one to write.

Which is probably why Mr. Duffy wove the distractions of the Loomis family, road trip, racial animosity and trying to be Salinger all around it, leaving the unsatisfying feeling that the thread had been dropped toward the end. I know the feeling. I was raised in a troubled family, and it's freaking hard to write about that stuff, even though I'm an excellent writer. That's why I use my excellent writing skills to write legal briefs for a living. There are some things you just can't say.

I've got an idea. Rewrite it. I know, it's too late, you've already published it. But why not? Just because it's never been done before? Really tackle that story about Frank losing his mother. The only genuinely moving parts of the book are those that directly tackle it. Frank loses his mother at an age when most teenagers are distancing themselves from their parents. And yet at no point in the book does he ever emit an ounce of GUILT? Look, maybe the whole book is about how Frank was distancing himself from the guilt that never shows, but if it really, REALLY never shows, then the reader can't be moved by it.

And yes, Mr. Duffy, I know I'm psychoanalyzing you. But your daughter kind of asked for it. And so did your book. And your Guggenheim.

After "The World as I Found It," this novel just left me bored. The character development is good but labored. I found the endless descriptions and musings of a young man whose mother has died simply tiresome. I could not finish the book

I knew Bruce as a phibeta kappa at the University of Md. I "reviewed" this book . I picked it up and set it down. Bruce is/was a talented individual but I thought the length and time involved was too much ( as Shaw remarked on Joyce).Great talent. Great length. In interpretation, realize Bruce's mother also died in his youth. Art imitates life.