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The Comeback Kids
| Article
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20608 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
3,338 Words |
| Author
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Morris Dickstein
Morris Dickstein teaches English at Queens College and is the
author of Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties,
which will appear in a new edition from Penguin Books in
January. |
If we consider how many bright, gifted young people were caught up in the political or cultural maelstrom of the sixties, it's surprising how few good novels have been written about that era. On the fingers of one hand, I can count Alice Walker's Meridian (which brings in the civil rights movement), Marge Piercy's Vida (dealing with the radical underground), Tim O'Brien's superb Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato, and Ann Beattie's Chilly Scenes of Winter, which captures the sense of drift and depression among middle-class youth in the gray aftermath of the decade. All these books came out in the seventies, when the passions and confusions of those turbulent years had died down; all dealt with the sixties rather obliquely, not as history but as a set of irresistible forces that simply took over people's lives.
Apart from this handful of impressive works, the journalistic and political clichés that bedeviled the subject prevented many people from distancing themselves and looking freshly at their lives. Most novels about the sixties were topical journalism, self-help therapy, or confessional writing disguised as fiction. David James Duncan's sprawling, funny, often wildly sentimental novel The Brothers K now joins a select company of works that ring true as inventive autobiography, as fiction, and as genuinely personal contributions to the history of the times.
Like his narrator, Kincaid Chance, Duncan grew up in a Seventh-Day Adventist household, and his father was a pitcher too. Both religion and baseball play pivotal roles in this story, and they enable him to portray the period (and much else) from an unexpectedly revealing angle. In a brilliant chapter, for example, Duncan introduces Roger Maris as a premature sixties radical for his single-minded but finally self-destroying pursuit of Babe Ruth's beloved home-run record in 1961. Despite this witty turn, both religion and baseball belong more to the world before the sixties, the world of the parents, though they also have a tremendous influence on the course the sons ultimately follow.
For all the space given to ballplaying--and very few serious novelists have written about baseball as charmingly and authentically as Duncan--the basic subject of The Brother K is the family. Kincaid's three older brothers, Everett, Peter and Irwin, are loosely modeled on Dostoevsky's Karamazov boys. (One of them, Everett, even falls in love with a woman who adores Russian literature and calls herself Natasha, and they later have a child she names Myshkin, after the hero of The Idiot).
But what
...
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