Books by author: David James Duncan

I'm not quire sure why I've rated this a 4 instead of a 5, since it is an excellent novel. Perhaps I'm reminded too much of John Irving's writing and it's my distaste for emotional manipulation and contrived storylines that lowers my opinion ever so slightly. I do, however, highly recommend The Brothers K.

The Brothers K tells the story of a family torn between the religions of Baseball and Seventh-Day Adventism. We watch the Chance brothers grow and mature as they watch their father ride his rocky professional baseball career. The novel is by turns heart-warming and -breaking and occasionally simply unbelievable. The key moral lesson seems to be that it is dangerous to devote one's entire being to a single pursuit, no matter how worthy it may appear to be. Perspectives change, things are not always what they seem, and digging oneself too deeply into a hole makes it hard to see or climb out.

Not having read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I am not clear on the ties between the two novels, other than that they are both about the relations within a family. The title of Duncan's novel is a clever pun for this reason as well as for the baseball connotation of "K".