LAST COMES THE EGG: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bruce Duffy achieved remarkable acclaim for his first book, The World As I Found It, a sweeping novel of ideas centering around the difficult personality of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ten years later, Mr. Duffy has produced a new book with a deceptively simple premise: a young boy copes with the loss of his mother during the tumultuous civil rights era. In a lesser writer's hands, Last Comes the Egg might have been just another coming-of-age novel, but Mr. Duffy takes the ordinary and makes something uncommon out of it. After his mother's death, 12-year-old protagonist Frank Dougherty takes off in a stolen car with two companions: Alvy, a tragically damaged altar boy; and Sheppy, an older African American boy with his own set of problems.

Duffy displayed fearlessness in tackling Wittgenstein in his first novel; he puts it to the test again by confronting race issues here. Throughout Last Comes the Egg the prose soars, the characters fascinate, and the journey is both harrowing and riveting.

From Publishers Weekly

The expectations raised by Duffy's astonishingly witty and entertaining first novel, The World As I Found It, which was based on the lives of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, are soundly met in his second. As a coming-of-age story (set in the early 1960s), the new novel is more mundane in concept than its predecessor; but Duffy's raw, off-center observations and syncopated prose cut new paths through well-trod territory. When Julie Dougherty takes ill and dies at age 38, her adolescent son, Frank, who narrates, and his father spin into separate, mad orbits in Corregidor, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Frank's father, the self-proclaimed Mr. Fixit of the neighborhood, soon begins dating Heidi, a younger, take-charge blonde who flirtatiously wrestles and cuddles with Frank. At the first opportunity, Frank turns his back on this family drama by taking up with Alvy Loomis, a teenager with a large, unruly family and a knack for plotting reckless, violent capers. Alvy, who's convinced that his sister Charlene is in fact his mother, steals a car and leads Frank and Sheppy, a motherless black kid, on a road trip through the American South to find and confront Charlene. During the journey, Frank comes to fear Alvy. Yet he realizes that, just as the laws of thermodynamics dictate that there's always "heat in cold," so is there always "love in hate." He sees that he can't hate Alvy or his own father without loving them, too. Against the backdrop of racial turmoil, soaking up the pop-cultural language and beat of the 1960s, Frank struggles to understand his childhood, his family and his motherless and bewildered friends. Duffy demonstrates the magic of seeing, showing how a vision of truth can turn misery into humor and pain into poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First edition. edition (January 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684808838
• ISBN-13: 978-0684808833
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,525,084 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Last Comes the Egg, April 14, 2005

A Kid's Review

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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Find Yourself Here, May 15, 1997

By A Customer

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unearths forgotten memories, September 3, 1999

By	[e-mail] (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

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).