LAST COMES THE EGG: A Novel - Hardcover

Duffy, Bruce

3.57

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780684808833: LAST COMES THE EGG: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684808838 ISBN 13: 9780684808833

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

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Two white boys and a Black boy in the early 1960s set out in a stolen car to find the love that is absent from their lives in the form of family or friends

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Review:

Bruce Duffy achieved remarkable acclaim for his first book, The World As I Found It, a sweeping novel of ideas centering around the difficult personality of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ten years later, Mr. Duffy has produced a new book with a deceptively simple premise: a young boy copes with the loss of his mother during the tumultuous civil rights era. In a lesser writer's hands, Last Comes the Egg might have been just another coming-of-age novel, but Mr. Duffy takes the ordinary and makes something uncommon out of it. After his mother's death, 12-year-old protagonist Frank Dougherty takes off in a stolen car with two companions: Alvy, a tragically damaged altar boy; and Sheppy, an older African American boy with his own set of problems.

Duffy displayed fearlessness in tackling Wittgenstein in his first novel; he puts it to the test again by confronting race issues here. Throughout Last Comes the Egg the prose soars, the characters fascinate, and the journey is both harrowing and riveting.

From Publishers Weekly:

The expectations raised by Duffy's astonishingly witty and entertaining first novel, The World As I Found It, which was based on the lives of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, are soundly met in his second. As a coming-of-age story (set in the early 1960s), the new novel is more mundane in concept than its predecessor; but Duffy's raw, off-center observations and syncopated prose cut new paths through well-trod territory. When Julie Dougherty takes ill and dies at age 38, her adolescent son, Frank, who narrates, and his father spin into separate, mad orbits in Corregidor, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Frank's father, the self-proclaimed Mr. Fixit of the neighborhood, soon begins dating Heidi, a younger, take-charge blonde who flirtatiously wrestles and cuddles with Frank. At the first opportunity, Frank turns his back on this family drama by taking up with Alvy Loomis, a teenager with a large, unruly family and a knack for plotting reckless, violent capers. Alvy, who's convinced that his sister Charlene is in fact his mother, steals a car and leads Frank and Sheppy, a motherless black kid, on a road trip through the American South to find and confront Charlene. During the journey, Frank comes to fear Alvy. Yet he realizes that, just as the laws of thermodynamics dictate that there's always "heat in cold," so is there always "love in hate." He sees that he can't hate Alvy or his own father without loving them, too. Against the backdrop of racial turmoil, soaking up the pop-cultural language and beat of the 1960s, Frank struggles to understand his childhood, his family and his motherless and bewildered friends. Duffy demonstrates the magic of seeing, showing how a vision of truth can turn misery into humor and pain into poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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