And so the Burgess brothers drove down to Maine from Upstate New York, along winding roads, past run-down farmhouses and farms not so run-down, past small houses and large houses with three cars out front, or a snowmobile, or a boat covered with tarp. They stopped for gas and got back on the road. Bob drove. Jim sat next to him, slumped down, sometimes fast asleep, or else staring out the passenger window.The Burgess Boys is the third novel I've read by Elizabeth Strout, and the first not to knock my socks off. What I've admired most in Strout's other books are the absolutely believable characters and the sweet moments of recognisable truth in their relationships. In this book, Strout introduces us to an interesting cast, layers on a politically charged storyline that I initially thought would be fascinating and timely, but in the end it felt like she was trying to do too much and didn't quite pull off either the family drama or the social commentary. Still, Elizabeth Strout on a bad day is better than most writers on their best.
What we learn nearly immediately (so I don't really think of it as a spoiler): Jim and Bob Burgess are both NYC attorneys (Jim of the high profile celebrity defender type, Bob writes appellate briefs for Legal Aid), and their sister Susan (a single mom who stayed on in their small hometown of Shirley Falls, Maine) calls her brothers in a panic because her oddball nineteen-year-old son has confessed to the hare-brained “prank” of rolling a half-frozen pig's head into a storefront Mosque. It would appear that lily-white Shirley Falls has seen a recent influx of Somali refugees, and in this confused atmosphere of grudging accommodation, Susan's son, Zack, committed an act he can't really explain with bigoted overtones he apparently doesn't understand (he had no idea that pigs were particularly offensive to Muslims, he thought the building was a “gathering place”, not a Mosque, and when it was pointed out to him that his actions were especially mortifying during Ramadan, Zack claims to have no idea what “Ramadan” means). The siblings are estranged (Bob and Susan, who are twins, have never liked each other), but the brothers rally to their nephew's side as the case makes the national news, the Maine Attorney General's office threatens a Civil Rights charge, and the FBI considers whether the act qualifies as a federal hate crime. Through rotating points-of-view, Strout does a good job of setting up all sides of the issue: Susan tries to explain what it has been like for their town to feel overrun by people who look and speak differently, Bob – the outsider, do-gooder liberal – counters with an idealistic view of global responsibility and local accommodation, Jim understands and explains the political motivations and manoeuvering behind the scenes of the justice system, and a Somali elder, Abdikarim, exposes the fear and humiliation his community experienced (both when the pig's head rolled into the room and when the police responded), discusses with other Somalis the wisdom of settling in the hostile community, and aims to see justice served.
Obviously, refugees are much in the news (Canada is filled with Bobs and Susans debating the 25k Syrians who have resettled here over the last year), and as the pig's head incident is based on a real case in Maine, the situation is ripe for a literary examination. And since Strout is not only a talented author but a member of the bar whose husband was formerly the AG of Maine, who better to take up her pen in the effort? Strout has Jim's wife, Helen, read an article on the refugee camps in Kenya from whence the Somalis came to America:
The women, in order to gather firewood, had to wander away from camp, where bandits might rape them; some of these women had been raped several times. Many of their children died of starvation right in their arms. The children who lived did not go to school. There were no schools. The men sat around chewing leaves – khat – which kept them high, and their wives, of which they could have up to four, had to try to keep the family alive with the little bit of rice and drops of cooking oil they received from the authorities every six weeks.Who wouldn't open their borders to these suffering people? But Susan has the view from front line America:
Some say it's not different from when the city was filled with French Canadian millworkers speaking French. But it is different because what nobody talks about is that they don't want to be here. They're waiting to go home. They don't want to become part of our country. They're just kind of sitting here, but meanwhile they think our way of life is trashy and glitzy and crummy. It hurts my feelings, honestly.(While Bob makes the case that the French Canadians eventually assimilated into the community, his point is undermined when, near the end of the book, Abdikarim meets with people who do intend to go back to Africa, where their children will be raised as Africans instead of trashy, glitzy, crummy Americans.) In a later scene, Bob's ex-wife Pam explains to him the underbelly of Somalian society based on a book she's reading (what appears to be one of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's), and his response felt to me like Strout's own final word on the matter:
That book is the right wing's dream. Do you not get that? Do you read the paper at all anymore? And second of all, I saw some of those so-called crazy people in the courtroom at Zach's hearing. And guess what, Pam? They're not crazy. They're exhausted. And partly they're exhausted by people like you reading about the most inflammatory aspects of their culture in some book club, and then getting to hate them for it, because deep down that's what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.I like a book about issues, and I was enjoying all of the different perspectives in The Burgess Boys, but just when this felt like it was going to get really good, the court case fizzled out, the refugee issue ceased to be a concern, and the second half of this became a book about the siblings and their relationships. And if it was ultimately about the characters, well, I never learned why Zach pulled his “prank” (other than being a sad sack kid who doesn't quite think through his own actions, which I do kind of understand, but it makes for unsatisfying fiction), Jim is cartoonishly abusive to his brother (and I didn't understand the soap opera his marriage becomes), Bob is cartoonishly patient and good, and I didn't understand why nobody liked Susan for her entire life (Not even her twin? Just because their mother yelled at only her? She's made to feel so peripheral that the book can't even be called The Burgess Siblings? What's up with that?)
The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.I liked the first half of this book and just wish Strout had stayed focussed on the courtroom drama; it was a really strong device for examining an important contemporary issue. Post-trial became less interesting, and then melodramatic. At the sentence-level the writing is strong and interesting, but I found few moments of universal truth, no satisfying character development, and no real resolution to the Somali refugee situation. I reckon it would probably be interesting for book clubs.
