Book Review 2019-007
The Other Brother by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
2018 by Diversion Books, 393 pages
(We purchased a copy of this book).
Every time we read a book written by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, about five of the over thirty she's penned, we think that we need to remember to pick up more from her. She comes up with great ideas and writes extremely entertainingly about those ideas. She infuses her stories with great humor and characters that if you'd not want to be great friends with, at least people you might believe you know.
The plot behind The Other Brother is a fictitious version of what may, or may not, be a real issue--being the younger brother of Mick Jagger. Now Mick's name isn't really mentioned through the novel, but it is on the back cover. Even without that verification though, it's not at all difficult to determine that's who is implied--British, not the tallest man in the world, skinny, and oh yeah, the lead singer of The Greatest Rock Band in the World. It turns out that his younger brother also sings a little and plays guitar and writes (and records) songs.
The narrator of the novel is Mona Springer, wife of Jack Springer, younger brother of superstar Denny Springer. It opens with the great line:
He sucked all the air out of the room.
The scene is at the house of Burt and Edith Springer, parents of Denny and Jack. It's Easter and for the first time in twenty years Denny (or Dennis as his parents and neighbor from across the street call him) has come back for dinner with the family but it doesn't go overly well. The sucking the air out of the room was in response to Jack telling a story and getting cut off by Denny's descriptions of playing in Malaysia.It was the opening salvo to a visit where his self-importance kept stepping to the forefront. After a smoke outside (Edith has No Smoking signs in every room of the house) where Mona joined him, Denny asked her to say goodbye to everybody for him. Before he took off, she suggested he come visit she, Jack, and their two boys (William and Harry, which of course leads to some Prince jokes through the early stages of the novel) when they vacation in the States later in the summer with the idea behind it to finally bond a little with his younger brother.
While there's a bit of backstory so the reader knows Mona and Jack a little better, as well as their children, the story really kicks into place after they've been at this Connecticut beach vacation home, where they'll spend the summer, for about two weeks. One of the reasons they'd come to this home for three months is that it had a sound-proofed basement, and Jack wanted to work on songs for his next album. He was spending much of the overnight time down there and so didn't hear when the door was being knocked on at about 2 a.m. one night. Mona answered, very surprised to find Denny, as well as two large bodyguards.
This visit from Denny (and his Boys, as well as his driver, "Jeeves") creates interesting scenarios--where will he (they?) stay, will he and Jack really bond, how will they keep his presence unknown, etc. What Baratz-Logsted does is use these issues and situations to write about families, and relationships, and how we don't really always know people, even those closest to us. The novel is exceptionally readable--I didn't put it down once we started it earlier today until we were done. The characters continue to develop through the novel, using the fact that Jack and Denny didn't know each other well to allow Baratz-Logsted to allow the characters to tell their stories to each other without it seeming like a lot of exposition on the writer's part. And she does this with extremely good pacing--we readers learn of aspects of each character just as we should throughout the novel, including things characters may have held from each other over the years, even Jack and Mona, until the last section. At that point, we learn a bit more, a bit that we believe maybe was intended to be a bigger surprise than it ended up being for us. Even with this as the case, we turned the last page once again thinking we need to pick up another title by Lauren Baratz-Logsted in the near future; good thing there are many to choose from.
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