“AT FIVE-THIRTY on Friday afternoon the eight-block crescent of downtown Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, looked like an airport postcard of a Mediterranean seaside village, one of those bathed-in-light towns, high off the sparkling water trees bent with wind, everything going red against a swelling sky.”
After Del Tribute almost sleeps with his brother's sexually edgy wife, Margaret, The Brothers sets out to trace and detail the intricate pattern of consequence of this near-indiscretion. In a remarkable performance that redefines and extends the territory of Frederick Barthelme's fictions, the love and desire of these brothers is laid open, explored, experienced. 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. At heart The Brothers is concerned with loyalty, fidelity, decency. It is a work as rich in depth and detail as it is reflective on its jewel-like, sun-splintered surface. The world fashioned here is a terrifyingly exact place, dense with the mysteries of genuine passion and hope, and its people are resolute and resilient. This world bears an extraordinary resemblance to ours.
