“Good. So good. Right up to the end.
The book has this great tone to it, and it captures boyhood in a way that reminded me of being a kid more than just about any other thing I can remember. There’s a very strange thing that happens between brothers. You sort of love each other, but also sort of hate each other. And at times, you really can act like, as the book suggests, animals. As one of the early chapters says, there’s never enough. Food or affection or daylight or anything. There isn’t enough of anything, ever.
What the book really got at, in a way you don’t see a lot, is what I’ve always thought of as the true nature of sibling relationships.
I think the cliche thing people say about family is something along the lines of “I beat the hell out of my brother. But if anyone else messed with him, I’d knock his block off.” Or “his lights out.” Or “him into next week.” Honestly, though, that feels like revisionist history to me and a lazy attempt to capture how strange it is to be with these kids who you are told to love yet represent your main competition in a lot of ways. Each brother is his own country competing for resources. Each brother is his own army, alternately making alliances and being the victim of them. Each brother is his own boy, but he’s also tied inexorably to these other boys without choice in the matter.
The writing is crisp, short, and does a great job of straddling the line between being a child narrator and an adult reminiscing, which makes it all feel so, so real.
The objection I have to the book is about the last 20 pages, when the narrator does a flash-forward of maybe ten years, is forced out of the closet after his family finds his journal, and describes his being put in some sort of psychiatric treatment. It’s not that this was any sort of problem for me. And there’s actually a poignant feeling of the bond between the three brothers dissolving, and this chain of events is definitely what makes this possible. But the rest of the book felt so slow, so small, so moment to moment that to leap forward and change the characters so much after we’ve been watching them grow up in pieces was less satisfying.
I don’t want to say the ending ruined the book or anything like that. I really don’t think that’s possible. And honestly, it probably had less to do with the ending and more to do with the fact THAT it ended. It’s a gorgeously written book, and just when I thought each of the short sections might be falling flat the wind would change direction and blow the dust off a beautiful, sometimes savage revelation. It worked for me in a big way.
I wonder if perhaps it was that I wasn’t ready to leave that world just yet. Growing up, you’re always ready to leave whatever age you are. When you’re 15, you’d take a pill that made you 16 in a heartbeat. It’s only later when you think how sometimes you’d like to be back there, how it felt safe. How punches and being “It” were a lot less scary than the stuff that happens when you’re older.
So I wonder. I wonder if there are times when I want to go back there. And I wonder if maybe, reading this book, I wanted to walk away thinking the characters would never have to leave that place.”