I wasn't sure I was going to write a review of this novel by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Elizabeth Strout (I usually only bother for books I feel strongly about, "six stars out of five" kinds of books), and "The Burgess Boys" is only a four (maybe 3.5... but I loved Olive Kitteridge so I'll round it up), but some parts are 2/5 and some parts are 6/5, and the 6/5 parts mean a lot to me so I decided, why not. Warning: this review contains spoilers!
The book is about a teenage kid who rolls a frozen pig's head into a mosque, in a small town in Maine that struggles with the influx of Somali refugees. This is in fact inspired by a real-life event, although the perpetrator was in his early 30s and not a teenager, and of course it is a lot easier to believe a kid didn't realize how offensive his gesture would be (he did it in connection to his father who lives in Sweden somehow, but I forget the link, the kid is portrayed as a harmless teen raised by a weird single mother). The Burgess boys of the title are really the boy's two uncles (although the nephew could be called a Burgess boy too), both of whom live in New York City, one who is a legal aid lawyer and a bit of a drifter and one who is a top attorney... until his life unravels, out of actions of his own doing. It is very difficult for a white person to write about racially charged situations without ending up with cardboard characters and trite dialogue, and I feel Strout doesn't avoid this pitfall, especially during the scenes with Somali characters.
That's the reason I almost stopped reading the book - no one among the main protagonists was changing, their reactions were predictable and the scenes were very well-written but they weren't bringing anything to the fore that I couldn't have imagined myself - the young, aimless boy raised by a weird single mother who meant the gesture as a stupid prank, the grown-ups around him who want to show the town residents are not racist, people who try to use the incident for their own gain, the Somali refugees who worry for their lives. It was all sadly very true, but I didn't connect with the main characters (the Burgess clan), which made it difficult to remain engaged in the book.
Then I leafed ahead and I realized Jim - the successful attorney - has his life unravel toward the second half of the book, and that spoke to me big-time (smacked me between the eyebrows, when I realized what it was about): the small-town kid who moves to the big city to make a name out of himself and succeed for a while until at some point, years later, his insecurities and/or his past get the better of him and his life goes into a tailspin. Jim ultimately self-sabotages in a spectacular manner. Thankfully, Bob gets better, the boy comes back and this family saga ends on the right note. There's even some hope that Jim will, at some point, get his life back on track.
Some details were hard to swallow, especially the fact that (spoiler alert) the Burgess boys' father was killed in an accident when the boys were young, and for most of the book it seems that the drifter Bob is he's the one who put the car in gear by mistake and had the car run his dad over (people have certainly become drifters for less than that), but in the end it turns out that it was perfect-boy Jim. Okay...
But I loved the part of the story about the small-town boys from Maine trying to make good in the big city (New York City), and a lot of why I loved that part is really more about my reading/interpretation of it rather than something Strout writes about deliberately, but anyway, the feeling you never quite cut it (Bob), the feeling "home" is a place you never want to hear about again until it pulls you back because someone needs help (Jim) and the way you end up self-sabotaging yourself after many fine years (Jim) were themes that resonated with me.
Strout herself was born in Portland, Maine and graduated from Bates College and the Syracuse School of Law before moving to New York City. In a speech at Syracuse, she explains that she went to law school as a fall-back plan (funny how few law grads ever say they've always wanted to be trial lawyers or corporate attorneys ever since they were little... funny how I studied engineering as a fall-back plan as well). It was a good thing she did, since it took her seven years to write her first book Amy and Isabelle, published when she was 42. (Favorite quote of this interview: " I was terrible [at being a lawyer] first of all because I just wanted to be writing stories.")
If you care to learn a bit more about Strout, I recommend this article, which has the quote about why she went to law school: "During the question-and-answer period at the end of the lecture, Strout explained that she went to law school because she knew she would need a job. She said she always wanted to be a writer but knew she needed something to fall back on; the law, she said, was a noble profession and her father approved." Turns out she took a semester off during law school to work at a department's store and didn't stay in the legal profession very long after graduation, but - silver lining - that is where she met her first husband. She is now married to the former Maine state attorney (someone also named Jim, although she started writing The Burgess Boys before the two had met and the resemblance between her Jim and the Jim of the book is purely coincidental.) I only wish someone at the Paris Review will have the good sense to sit her down for the magazine's famed interview series.
I liked The Burgess Boys overall, although I came very close from stopping halfway through. There are parts I truly loved, and I can't wait to read Strout's next book. We small-town people who have moved on to bigger playgrounds have to stick together, don't we?
