The Brothers - Softcover

Barthelme, Frederick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582431302 ISBN 13: 9781582431307

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Frederick Barthelme is the author of eleven books of fiction. His most recent is The Law of Averages: New and Selected Stories. He directs the writing program at the University of Southern Mississippi and edits Mississippi Review. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1582431302
• ISBN 13: 9781582431307
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272