Brothers

David James Duncan's early-'90s novel The Brothers K -- about the brothers Chance, who seem (in the spirit of William James's remark*) always willing to live on a chance -- is a sprawling epic tale centered on the foibles and exploits of a family like none I've ever encountered, and in that way more than any other resembles Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. Both families encounter more than their share of heartache and disappointment. Both pose deep probing questions about suffering and unredeemable injustice in our world and the true meaning and value of freedom. Both challenge easy optimism and thoughtless theodicy.

But Dostoevsky's family features no pitching paterfamilias on the comeback trail, no hyper-pious Seventh Day Adventist Mom or Darwin-loving atheist grand-mum, no immersion in American  '60s counterculture, no laugh-out-loud acerbic wit (at least not to my sensibility), no stirring reflections on the philosophical dimensions of fly-fishing and what that has in common with baseball.

Also missing from Duncan's tome, despite its philosophical edge and penchant for oracular speechifying, is the sort of ponderous metaphysical ruminating I associate with 19th century Russian lit...and with Love and Death.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

There's enough material in Bros K to fill out my next several Ottawa presentations, I think. So I'm going to try and avoid spoilers this year, and just make the central point that Duncan’s larger message counters Russian resignation and fatalism with aspiration, effort, and good old pragmatic meliorism. 

In light of my recent revisitation with Richard Ford's Independence Day, on the frequent frustrations and ultimate impotence of parenting (which I want to distinguish from the hope implicit in "natality" as Hannah Arendt articulates it), I may also mention the parent-child dynamic in the Chance clan. We can try to shine a light, but can’t make them bask in it. Kids must finally learn their own hard life lessons and discover their own role-modeling father/mother figures. 

Older Daughter once discovered Albus Dumbledore, who said happiness is always on tap if we just remember to turn on the lights. Lately she's been turning, time-capsule fashion, to her own future self for guidance. I think that's wise.

It was unwise, in Bros K, for Mom and son Irwin to turn to the Adventist minister. He's the Bland Inquisitor, counterpart to Dostoevsky's Grand, whose betrayal sends Irwin off to Vietnam at the worst possible time despite his Adventist conscientious objection. (Was there ever a good time for an American to be sent to Vietnam under the auspices of American domino-blocking?) And he offers one prominent illustration of my presentation title "No Justice in This World"...

Take a chance on Bros K, if you need a hopeful beach read. But I'd leave the Karamazovs behind. 

* “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

 Postscript. Just caught up to yesterday's poem, Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, and one line in particular: All chance, direction, which thou canst not see... 

Pope was a Leibnizian/Panglossian hyper-optimist, as the concluding lines pronounce:

All discord, harmony, not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

The brothers Chance (and their Papa) learn, the hard way, that Pope (A. or the) was dead wrong. But still they bear their freedom with dignity and perseverance. They're meliorists. 

Or maybe we should just say they're pluggers, just doing what they can .