The Burgess Boys: A Novel (2013)
Elizabeth Strout
Random House
9781400006768
* * * * *
Forget Appalachia or the mean streets of urban America. In
the literary world these are garden spots when compared with interior Maine. In
the novels of Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft, this is where axe murders,
psychos, and unspeakable terrors reside, to say nothing of the feral trailer
dwellers depicted by Carolyn Chute. At best, inland Maine is a place time
forgot, as in John Irving’s Cider House
Rules, or the resting place of the American Dream, as in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. Elizabeth Strout won’t
resurrect life beyond the coast in her latest, The Burgess Boys, but it sure is one terrific piece of writing–even
better, in my view, that her 2008 Olive
Kitteridge, which won a Pulitzer.
The Burgess Boys
centers on brothers Jim and Bob Burgess, Bob’s twin sister, Susan, and her son,
Zach. The brothers are a typical American story–two small town guys who impressed
the locals but couldn’t wait to catch the first bus out of their postindustrial
town and reinvent themselves in the big city. In Jim’s case, he used his
cleverness and silver tongue to parlay a high-profile lost-cause legal case
into a dramatic victory that secured a partnership in a high-powered New York
City law firm and marriage with the sophisticated Helen. Outwardly, he
possesses the entire package: money, fine things, an upscale apartment, fancy
vacations, a doting wife, and grown kids that ignore him. Bob, also a lawyer,
isn’t (and never was) in his big brother’s league, but even though he’s made a
muck of a few things (divorce, a job in New York’s break-down lane, sloppy
personal habits), he too was happy to flee Shirley Falls, Maine if, for no
other reason, he associates it with the accident his four-year-old self caused
that killed the Burgess paterfamilias. In short, Shirley Falls remembers the
Burgess boys–especially Jim–but they are doing their best never to think about their
roots. And so they would have lived out their days, were it not for a frantic
phone call from Susan, whose son Zach got into a scrape with the law. Fancy
pants Jim can’t be bothered and convinces Bob to make a quick trip north to
secure a local lawyer to clean up the mess. It’s never that simple, is it?
Those who know Maine will recognize Shirley Falls as a
thinly disguised stand-in for Lewiston–a former industrial powerhouse whose
textile manufacturers fled decades ago, leaving the city with empty factories,
a declining population, a ruined tax base, and lots of cheap housing. In other
words, a perfect place to relocate refugee immigrants. Lewiston received
several thousand Somalis and Bantus, most of them via the greater Atlanta area,
where crime and xenophobia made them feel less than welcome. Mainers weren’t crazy
about them either, though at least the Somalis were physically safer there.
That is, until Zach did something very stupid: he secured a frozen pig’s head
from a local abattoir and tossed it into a storefront used as a makeshift
mosque–during Ramadan no less!
The “crime” itself is a misdemeanor, but then that’s never
that simple either. Not when local knee-jerk liberals want to make it their
cause célèbre, Somali families are terrified, and ambitious attorneys and
politicians smell upward mobility if they can quash a “hate crime.” Poor Zach
can’t even explain why he did it, other than it was supposed to be a “joke.”
When it’s clear that no one’s laughing, he’s scared out of his mind. We see him
for what he is–a screwed up kid dealt a bad hand (single mom, absentee father,
hand-to-mouth existence, lousy schooling, a job at Wal-Mart), but now he’s the
one thing he never wanted to be: the center of attention.
Strout uses this drama to probe others: family secrets, bullying,
perceptions and realities…. Above all, it’s a book that teaches us never to
confuse the masks people wear in public with the psyches of those behind the
masks. The book is taut in language, psychological tension, and revelatory
power. One of the year’s best literary works, this one is sure to be
shortlisted for a host of prizes. And is sure is proof that Olive Kitteridge was no fluke.--Rob Weir
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