A Review of Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter

Bezalel Stern is a lawyer and freelance writer who lives in New York. He is currently at work on his first novel about the life and times of a Wall Street day trader.For some obvious reasons (and others not quite so obvious) around this time of year I often go back to Richard Ford's masterful novel Independence Day. Independence Day, the second book in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, revolves around the eponymous holiday. It takes place, like the other books in the trilogy, over a single weekend. Also like the other two books, it aims not just to chronicle a couple of days in the life of its narrator, but also to digest the ethos of the holiday into a concrete space.Independence Day is especially relevant, perhaps, this year, as the book's backdrop is the 1988 financial and housing slump, which, when reading Frank Bascombe's perspective of it, at least, seems awfully similar to the contemporary housing crisis. Bascombe, a former fiction writer cum sportswriter, is now a real estate agent, and one who seemed to have gotten into the gig at the worst possible time. The heady buying frenzy of the arguably irresponsible Reagan years is coming to an abrupt end, as home values are on the verge of a steep and then virtually unprecedented decline, and the economy teeters toward a freefall (history does seem to repeat itself, doesn't it). Frank Bascombe, a lonely divorcee with two children he hardly ever sees and an on again off again girlfriend, is in a sort of freefall of his own. He is simply trying, as the book begins, to remain independent, from relationships, from feelings, from everything. In a word, Bascombe is simply trying to exist. It is no surprise, then, that he terms this period in his life the "Existence Period".The problem is that, as Bascombe comes to realize, it is hard to simply exist in a world where you have to interact with others. And so, over the course of a jam-packed four day weekend during which Frank interacts with all sorts of Americans of different socio-economic, religious, and racial backgrounds (this is no accident, of course), Frank slowly learns to wean himself away from the dependencies of the Existence Period. Meanwhile, Frank's teenage son, Paul, who's meant to stand for the wrong kind of independence (but because the novel is so well written, comes across as much more than a simple metaphor), loses himself in anger and alienation. While he is free, in a sense, Paul seems adrift, unable to know what he is declaring his independence from or his allegiance to.Ford is a masterful storyteller. In my opinion, he's one of the great American novelists writing today. I find the layers of his Bascombe novels in particular - each sentence seems virtually packed with meaning and thought - just short of miraculous. Independence Day is a book that, especially in times of national instability (and, dare I say it, crisis?) bears a second (or third) read.It's amazing to me the way Ford can make simple truths not simply seem profound, but actually be profound. So, by the end of the novel, when, after having thrown around Emerson and Jefferson and revolutionary philosophy, Frank comes to the conclusion that true independence means not going it alone, but dealing with the world around you in a mature and concentrated manner, interacting with and building relationships with others; when, in other words, Frank leaves his Existence Period for a new, perhaps scarier, more challenging, but certainly more fulfilling life of personal interactions that matter, the verities Frank Bascombe professes no longer seem so simple.The book contains ideas worth thinking about, and seriously. True independence, for Ford, consists, it seems to me at least, of actually being able to understand why people who are different from yourself - perhaps incredibly so - do what they do. In being able to work with them, and to learn from them as well."The original framers" of the constitution, Frank says at one point in the novel, "wanted to be free to make new mistakes, not just to keep making the same old ones over and over as separate colonies and without showing much progress. That's why they decided to band together and be independent and were willing to sacrifice some controls they'd always had in hopes of getting something better."People who have practically nothing in common banding together to be independent. As counterproductive as it sounds, it's what made this country free. Real independence, Ford posits, is all about making connections. Independence is with people.

Literary awards please almost no one. As William Gass famously complained, “any award giving outfit is doomed to make mistakes and pass the masters by in silence.” Each year, nominees are announced and each year readers and critics love to grumble. The 2004 National Book Award Nominees for fiction, however, inspired a level of grousing rarely seen in the last decade. Each nominee for the shortlist was a woman, and each woman lived in New York City. Immediately, both the mainstream press and the literary blogosphere started throwing about terms: Elitist. Insular. Sameness. The New York Times gleefully reported that none of the women nominated had sold more than 2,000 copies of their books and quoted the literary editor of The Atlantic as saying, “I thought this was a really weak year for fiction, but I still wouldn't have guessed that any of these would have been strong contenders.''  Major newspapers that had not reviewed the books attempted one-fell-swoop pieces in which they treated the five disparate works as some sort of literary quintet, complete with facile pronouncements about their collective shortcomings. Chairman of the judges panel Rick Moody took a good deal of criticism for imposing his aesthetic with too heavy a hand. Caryn James of the Times searched (and claimed to find) common links between all the nominees, writing: “all five are built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers' program language, too woozy and poetic for its own good.” Of course, this was a stretch. Five books by five women from the same city of eight million souls do not make for a uniform aesthetic. Anyone who reads one sentence written by 2004 nominee Christine Schutt, a former Gordon Lish acolyte known for her attention to the sonics of language, repetition, and rhythm as well as unusual and stunning verb choice will immediately see the folly of James’ claim. Joan Silber, another one of the five nominees has a strikingly different prose style, a much more straightforward and unadorned mode that could not be further from Schutt. Lost in all the befuddlement about these relative unknowns and their supposed similarities were the actual merits of the books nominated. Among the crop of nominees was Joan Silber, nominated that year for her “ring of stories,” Ideas of Heaven, a work that explores the long-term impact that a single choice can have on a life. In every chapter/story, a Silber character is faced with a decision that takes decades to reveal its true repercussions, and often the actual impact of this decision will lie unrealized, producing subtle and destructive consequences for the rest of the character's life. Whether Silber characters inhabit 16th century Italy or contemporary America, all of them are similarly preoccupied when it comes to life-choices and whether the passage of time allows for any sort of lesson at all when it comes to reflecting on the lives they have chosen (or been forced) to live. In both Ideas of Heaven and her 2008 work, Size of the World, Silber utilizes nearly identical structures to portray the universality of this condition. Regardless of time period, Silber employs strikingly similar narrative voices for all of her characters, with few allowances for age or gender.  In the same way that Silber’s characters from different countries and time periods have nearly identical emotional concerns, the consistency of voice in Ideas of Heaven and Size of the World is yet another Silber technique employed to demonstrate the shared humanity of these disparate characters in the most varied of circumstances. What, you might wonder, is the “ring of stories” referred to in Ideas of Heaven? How is the ring related to the linked short story, the novel-in-stories, and the plain old-fashioned novel? Though there is no sport more boring and useless than literary classification, when Silber’s Ideas of Heaven is paired with Size of the World, one can see how little this question matters. (Even the author may not be the most authoritative in this case. In an interview with The Millions, Silber herself calls Ideas of Heaven “a hybrid between the novel and linked stories” and refers to the structure of Size of the World as simply, “this form.”) Billed on the front as “a novel,” Size of the World utilizes almost the exact same structure as Ideas of Heaven, the “ring of stories.” In both works, Silber has pioneered a distinct form, a crowd-told tale of multiple first person narrators, each chapter building on the next, but with each narrator’s story containing a dramatic structure traditionally associated with short fiction. In fact, chapters from both Ideas of Heaven and Size of the World were published in journals and anthologies as standalone short stories. However, the Silber-applied “ring” in question likely refers to the fact that as the reader progresses through the work, the newer stories alter understanding of the earlier stories, until by the very end they have eventually circled back and all affected each other. Silber utilizes passage of time like few of her contemporaries. Most interesting is Silber’s usage of what she herself calls, “long time.” In each story or chapter in Size of the World and Ideas of Heaven, decades pass, often in one sentence. “We went through all our savings, such as they were, in those five years in Ohio,” from Ideas of Heaven, or “In the third year we were together, the band had such a long dry spell that Randy got side work with a friend’s combo that did weddings and bar mitzvahs,” from Size of the World. But Silber’s “long time” is not merely about summary and exposition. Silber herself has laid out the blueprint for how what exactly “long-time” is and how she accomplishes it in her craft book, The Art of Time in Fiction. Though ostensibly an exploration of how authors manage and explore time in their work, Silber glides over “classic time”, “slowed time” and others to get to the passage of time she clearly finds most engaging: long time. The most consistent Silber technique in long time is to utilize habitual action as though it were a single event. Examples abound in every chapter or story in both Ideas of Heaven and Size of the World as well as many of Silber’s earlier short stories. In Size of the World, Corrina, who eventually spends six years in what is then Siam, narrates her gradual comfort with the land around her: My walks got longer, along the roads going inland, with paddies and forest on either side. Often I wanted to bring back a flower or a leafy stalk, but the stem were too fleshy to break, and I had a rational fear of sticking my hand in the foliage. I knew about snakes. Silber discusses the benefits of this method in The Art of Time in Fiction, naming Flaubert and Chekhov as masters of this technique and claiming that “even in a story that leaps over long spans of time,” such a move allows for “the intimacy of the close gaze.” Though other contemporary authors often deal with extended periods of time, few do so in the manner of Silber. Alice Munro, for instance, also often chronicles decades in the lives of her characters. Munro, however, utilizes shifting perspectives and frequently jumps forwards or backwards in time. Though Silber often credits Munro as a major influence, Silber’s work is much more constrained. Once a Silber character begins narrating a chapter or story, you can be sure that she will remain the sole narrator. In Munro, this is far less likely. Additionally, Munro is much more likely to experiment with tense, with stories completely told in present tense, (“Walker Brothers Cowboy”) or alternating between past and present (“Accident”). Silber characters all narrate their past from a usually undetermined later period in life. Where for Munro, time may be elastic, for Silber, time is guaranteed to be a linear progression that is difficult to make sense of. Though sole incidents often deeply affect Silber and Munro characters for the rest of their lives, the two authors differ in their illustrations of these effects. Unlike in Munro stories, a Silber character may think about the past, but they will never do it in scene. Though the first person narrators who populate Size of the World and Ideas of Heaven are of distinct genders, nationalities, time periods, and generations, Silber uses the same technique of long time in each of the stories/chapters. Silber seems to utilize the long form in order to allow the weight of an action to fully inhabit its impact on the character. That is, time passes in Silber stories so the reader can fully understand the effect a seemingly unimportant decision or unforeseeable event (a car crash, a hurricane) can have on the rest of a character’s life. To truly demonstrate the impact of these events and how they change the character(s) in question, a good deal of time must pass. Unlike Alice Munro and other contemporary authors, Silber rarely withholds information. Before a reader begins a story/chapter in Size of the World, a heading makes the reader aware of the narrator’s name, as well as an encompassing emotion that will be present in the story (envy, lust, paradise, loyalty, etc).  In addition to her titles, Silber’s beginnings ground the reader immediately. For example, “Paradise” from Size of the World, begins as follows: “We moved to Florida in 1924, just as the land boom was taking off. We were not a young family—I was already twenty-one and my parents were in their forties and fifties.” With assistance from the title, we already know from the first two sentences that our narrator’s name is Corrina, as well as her age, the time period, and geographic location. A consistent Silber sub-theme within her explorations of time and its effects is uprootedness and migration. As time passes, Silber characters tend to repeat both the process of falling in love with a new place and being upended and wishing one was back in the place that was once unfriendly. This pattern is a constant in Size of the World as well as Ideas of Heaven. Even when Silber characters are unhappy with the geographic location in which they find themselves, they rarely find the place overwhelming for very long.  If they do, they soon—via Silber’s habitual time rendered as scene—become acclimated in several paragraphs that may span years. This is not to say that Silber characters are always happy where they are. Quite often, they would simply rather be elsewhere, or are visitors in the place that they call home. It is only the passage of time that dulls their sense of dislocation.  Silber’s Annunziata, in Size of the World, uprooted from Sicily: “I didn’t really want to get better at knowing Hoboken, things—deep in my heart they didn’t interest me—but I learned them, inch by inch, in spite of myself.” For Silber, the decades passing allow the reader to recognize the long-term impact of decisions on the characters. In her project of exploring the devastating or healing effects of time, Silber has created a rare formula, exploring very large questions through the tiniest and most specific of lives.