The Hundred Brothers speaks for all of us because we all inescapably feel ourselves to be the special center of our private worlds. It’s a funny novel and a sad novel because this natural solipsism of ours is belied—rendered both ridiculous and tragic—by our ties of love and kinship to private worlds that we are necessarily not the center of.

At the level of technique, the book is a marvel: has to be a marvel, for, without supreme authorial control of scene and sentence and detail, it would collapse under the weight of its preposterous premise. In the opening sentence, Antrim manages to name and specify, through the magic of his commas and semicolons and dashes and parentheses, all ninety-nine of the brothers who have come together for drinks and dinner, bad masculine behavior, and avoidance of the work of giving their father’s funeral ashes a proper burial. (This opening sentence also contains the book’s first and last reference to a particular woman, Jane, who is responsible for the disappearance of the hundredth brother; it’s as if, according to the novel’s logic, the mere naming of a Significant Other is enough to exclude a brother from the narrative.) The story takes place entirely in the enormous library of the family’s ancestral mansion, from the windows of which the campfires of homeless people can be seen in the “forlorn valley” outside the property’s walls, and the action is confined to a single night, punctuated here and there by glimpses of the family’s history of brother-on-brother cruelty and violence. (Doug’s recollection of the childhood game of Kill the Man With the Ball, a game that embodies the love/hatred between siblings and prefigures their latter-day scapegoating ritual, is particularly inspired.) The incidents that occur on this single night are often farcical, often frustrating to Doug and to the reader, and always intensely vivid and specific. Taken together, they amount to a dextrous feat of choreography, in which Doug, the self-appointed Corn King, is the lead dancer who engages all the others as he makes his way around the library.

The novel is a feat of exclusion and inclusion, too. Left out of it are women (including, especially, the brother’s mother or mothers), children, any reference to a particular place or year, and any realistic accounting of how there came to be so many brothers, how they all fit into a single house, and what their lives outside the house are like. Within these fantastical confines, however, can be found a remarkably complete catalog of the things that men do and feel among men. Football, fisticuffs, food fights, chess playing, bullying, gambling, hunting, drinking, pornography, pranking, philanthropy, power tools (“Doug, I need my belt-sander back,” the brother Angus says in passing), homosexual cruising, anxieties about incontinence and penis size and middle-age weight gain: it’s all there. The book also, despite its brevity, contains a deftly telescoped genealogy of human knowledge and experience, reaching from prehistory up through a very belated present day in which civilization seems to be teetering at the brink of collapse. Just as a vast collection of books and periodicals on every subject and from every era is housed in a single leaky and neglected library, so the totality of human archetypes (“the primeval aspects of the Self,” in Doug’s phrase) are gathered together in the single heroic, failing consciousness of the narrator.