![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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