His two uncles - Jim, an extremely successful and famous defense lawyer at a high-end Manhattan firm, and Bob, a die-hard liberal who works for the legal aid society - offer to help steer him and his mother through the catastrophe.Ĭomplicating the family’s ability to cooperate are animosities that vibrate constantly at a low, painful pitch.

The boy will be arrested and, in a community fraught with new racial tensions, may well be prosecuted for committing a hate crime. During Ramadan.” It was, he explains, just “a dumb joke” (and one that appears to be based on an actual incident that occurred in Lewiston in 2006).

Shirley Falls, a depressed former mill town with a substantial influx of Somali refugees, was also the setting of Strout’s first novel, “Amy and Isabelle.” Susan’s son, a shy, friendless boy who works at the local Walmart, has thrown a frozen pig’s head through the door of a local Somali mosque - “During prayer.

Zach has gotten into some serious trouble. A sour, divorced optometrist, Susan still lives in Maine, where they were all raised, with her 19-year-old son, Zach, and an elderly female lodger. That the marriages of these adult siblings are either over or in a rocky state is kept in the background of a narrative primarily concerned with the affinities and enmities played out among these three during a family crisis.Īt the start of the novel, the “boys” happen to be together in Brooklyn, where both live, when Jim receives a desperate call from their sister. In Elizabeth Strout’s fluid and compassionate new novel, “The Burgess Boys,” her first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Olive Kitteridge,” the connections among Jim Burgess and his younger twin brother and sister, Bob and Susan, are central to the story. Yet why should that be, given the deep imprint siblings can make? Staying intimate with one’s spouse is a challenge, certainly, but the problems posed by a difficult brother or sister can be just as painful. Stories of marital relations - strained, destroyed or restored - surely take up a larger section of our fiction shelves than stories of brothers and sisters.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout