Review by Booklist Review
Love and pain, decency and delusion, banality and grotesquerie, are coin of the realm in Barthelme's slightly skewed version of "Life in These United States." Del Tribute, nearly 44, receives a condo in Biloxi as a divorce present from his wealthy ex-father-in-law in Houston. The move to Mississippi will reunite Del, a communications Ph.D. who failed at political public relations because "he lost interest too quickly," with his 50-plus brother Bud and Bud's restless younger wife, Margaret, both junior college teachers of communications and technical writing. But Bud has left for Hollywood with dreams of a movie deal when Del arrives, and Del and Margaret stumble into "sexual play." Bud comes back, moves out, then moves back with Margaret, but resists her desire to have or adopt a child. Del takes up with 24-year-old Jen, who is editor, publisher, and sole distributor of a variously titled "one-page magazine" that gathers weird, often gory news stories from computer databases and bulletin boards. But the center of The Brothers is the fraternal ties and tribulations of Del and Bud, aging adolescents, inarticulate communicators, wresting depressingly tiny victories from a life in which "none of it mattered much . . . [and] things were getting stranger," with pungent Gulf breezes and garish tourist-town vistas filling the background. ~--Mary Carroll
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Weird ironies of American mass culture highlight the quandaries of characters reaching middle age in Barthelme's understated, low-key tale of filial relations and midlife crises set in contemporary Mississippi. Shortly before his 44th birthday, recently divorced Del Tribute relocates to Biloxi, where his brother Bud lives. But Bud is on the road to Hollywood, where he seeks revitalization and success, and Del finds himself sharing a house with his attractive sister-in-law Margaret. Their mutual affection rapidly goes beyond acceptable bounds, creating guilt, awkwardness and confusion upon Bud's return. While Del begins a new life that soon includes Jen, a sexy young true-crime buff, Bud and Margaret try to repair their marriage, and all four grapple with their changing relationships. Barthelme ( Natural Selection ) revisits familiar themes of love, sex, marital strife, divorce and midlife depression set against the landscape of postmodern America (from computer bulletin board services to mass advertising to roadside vendors) with his trademark precision, ear for trendy, idiomatic speech and eye for paradox. A slow, ruminative narrative written in spare, sardonic prose and packed with odd insights and up-to-the-minute detail, the novel is a leisurely tour through a milieu to which Barthelme is undoubtedly the foremost guide. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
