Author: Frederick Barthelme
Publisher:
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
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"Along with his new girlfriend, Jen, a rough kid who publishes her own little terrorzine and just finished living in the back of a van with a guy who sells bikinis to tourists, Del tries to repair the damage he imagines is done to his relation with his brother Bud, and in the process tries to recapture and reinvent the sense of family long missing from his life. This all happens in Biloxi, on the dirty, soured, dinky coast of Mississippi, pretty much as it is right now: blisteringly hot, sandy, under construction, but still oddly foreign and magical. With these middle-class folks as his primary cast, Barthelme deftly demonstrates that there is enough beauty and wonder in ordinary life to satisfy all of us, if we only watch out for it - watch out for the light decaying over black trees, the raid that creeps up windshields, the sight and sound and smell of everyday. In The Brothers, bit players skewer the stiffs of the culture, the runaways add runaway priests, the do-gooders, the way-too-earnest and the way-too-cynical, the fairly smart, the broadcast morons who for God knows what reasons we attend night after night. And when they drive in this novel - and they do drive - the highway is a big sculpture, a stage for drifters, boneheads, self-parodies, error-handlers, a ride-through zoo where we witness the many edges of cultural disenchantment, where we are the exhibit and the sightseer, too.".