Reviews for Last Comes the Egg

The average rating for Last Comes the Egg based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-05 00:00:00 Algelan Pineda Are you sleepy?" Dad asks, naturally thinking I'm sleepy. Sleepy when, even now, I'll have the happiest little dreams! Flashes of you not gone and everything like it was before. Darkly, off one eyelash, the crushed glass glitters, so that I could be eight, ten, before. And it's not so bad... I have these split-second dreams, just the happiest, prettiest little dreams, sputtering like raindrops off my eyelashes. - - - - - - - - - - - First comes the chicken - last comes the egg? well, maybe This isn't an easy book to read. Not because of the language, anything like that, but just because it's tough to parse the whys and wherefores, the statements kids make, what does he mean? And I don't mean to imply or even pretend that I got everything that the author wrote. This is another fictional autobiography, like another book I've recently finished but not yet reviewed, Manchild in the Promised Land. Or maybe I should say fictional sort-of biography, cause the author Bruce Duffy has based the story very loosely on some of his own experiences growing up, experiences in the same general time, place, and circumstances that Frank Dougherty that child of his imagination did. This paragraph will tell you all the story part of the story that you will get in this review. When Frank is 12 his mother dies. This is the start of a period when he and his dad have a very difficult time. And Frank comes to know another kid who is a year or two older, Alvy, who seems more mature but who really has his own problems, and after some initial fighting they become friends, though the relationship can be (and is) described in different terms besides friendship. And through Alvy Frank meets a colored boy named Sheppy who is staying with a relative or maybe not staying with anyone, in a down-in-the-hole black part of the Maryland suburb where these guys live. And the climax of the book, after many experiences involving mostly Frank and girls and his dad and other adults who live in the same part of town, and quite a few involving Alvy too, and a few involving Sheppy too - the climax is further experiences had by all three as they steal a car(s) and drive into the South, each having their own reasons for wanting or being willing at least to do this. Now be clear - the writer of this book, Bruce Duffy, has this "sort-of-like" relation to the narrator of the book (first person all the way) but mostof the way the narrator is remembering (or imagining that he remembers) what he was, and what he did, and what he thought, and what especially he emoted when he was 12, 13, 14 years old - mostly in there but some younger times. But around the end, and even in one or two spots elsewhere, the narrator speaks as he is at the end of the story, when he is his thirties, and has a child of his own (daughter as a matter of fact, not son like to his dad was). And whenever Frank mentions "you" in his story (apart from dialogue), he's not talking to you the reader, he's talking to his dead mom - cause she is the person the whole tale is ultimately addressed to. So the narration, just the story that Frank (young Frank, who is middle-aged Frank at the end) tells us, is hard to follow now and then - because Duffy tells that story oh-so-much like a 121314 year old would tell it, thinking things and making connections and finding reasons that a middle-aged person would not - because that latter person knows so much more about the world and people than the 121314 year old kid knows - even though that kid thinks he knows everything better than his dad. In fact some things Frank knows but Dad doesn't and some things Dad knows but Frank doesn't and some things they both know and some things they neither one know. But the truth is, that when either thinks he knows, he may know and he may not know - and the reader may know which, or the reader might not have a clue, and either way you just got to keep on reading. And what's with this egg? Well that's explained here and there in the book, and for me was one of the things I knew I didn't know, and even when near the end the narrator speaks as the 30-something man, and says some pretty interesting things about the egg, things sort of shifted for me and I thought I did understand but y' know, maybe I didn't. That's why I keep thinking about the egg, and what Frank the 121314 year old says about it (though that may be more the 30-something talking, because though Frank is pretty sharp, I'm not sure this egg thing is something he really thought through at that 6-digit age or whether the notion was just something which was sort of there in his mind and sort of grew slowly (like an egg) without his really understanding what is was and what was inside it. The book reminded me of High Wind in Jamaica which also tells a story about the way people younger than us adults have a sort of way of discovering and thinking about the world that is so different that it makes them just so weird. Richard Hughes though tells that story as more of a dream, while Duffy tells this story as sort of a kid's jarring way of handling a childhood that seems in most ways pretty much like many kids, but then again seems so different, or at least described so differently, from almost all kids. This book, published in 1997, was Duffy's second novel. His first was The World As I Found It (1987) and the third was Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud (2012). So he worked on this second novel for the better part of ten years. If some of it make you think that he just dashed it off quickly, think again. When I read his first, I thought it was superb. When I read his third, I thought it may have been better. But this … this is just about a kid, not a famous philosopher or infamous poet. SO maybe it's the best of all. Here's a review of Last Comes the Egg from the New York Times. I haven't read it yet, but I will when this review is finished. I may come back with something else to say, which I'll add below if so. A mostly positive review, fairly brief, worth reading. Avoids spoilers.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-12-24 00:00:00 Ricky McCray "'Last Comes the Egg'' is a tender, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story as well as a finely wrought tale of family dysfunction... Here, in the section devoted to their flight, 'Last Comes the Egg' reveals that its true antecedent is the great American novel of adolescence, 'Huckleberry Finn.' Just as Twain's novel employed the language and consciousness of a marginal man-child to reveal the corruption of a slave-owning society that believed itself 'sivilized,' so does 'Last Comes the Egg' uncover the hidden scars beneath the compulsive optimism of postwar America. (Like Twain, Mr. Duffy also makes liberal use of the ''N'' word, and of phonetically rendered black dialect, which may get him in trouble, as it has Twain.) With a remarkably light touch, Mr. Duffy exposes a world riven by racism, class envy and soul-killing emptiness. That this exposure and its implications are not new takes nothing away from his novel. In daring to go where so much American literature has gone before, Bruce Duffy has created a picture of American life that is honest, disturbing and original." -A.O. Scott, The New York Times