The Hundred Brothers
For my father
HARRY THOMAS ANTRIM
and for his brother
ROBERT ELDRIDGE ANTRIM (1940–1992)
INTRODUCTION BY
JONATHAN FRANZEN
The Hundred Brothers is possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American. Its author, Donald Antrim, is arguably more unlike any other living writer than any other living writer. And yet, paradoxically—in much the same way that the novel’s narrator, Doug, is at once the most singular of his father’s hundred sons and the one who most profoundly expresses the sorrows and desires and neuroses of the other ninety-nine—The Hundred Brothers is also the most representative of novels. It speaks like none of us for all of us.
Midway through his narrative, Doug spells out the fundamental fact that drives it: “I love my brothers and I hate their guts.” The beauty of the novel is that Antrim has created a narrator who reproduces, in the reader, the same volatile mixture of feelings regarding the narrator himself: Doug is at once irresistibly lovable and unbearably frustrating. The genius of the novel is that it maps these contradictory feelings onto the archetypal figure of the scapegoat: the exemplary sufferer who recurs throughout human history, most notably in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, as an object of both love and homicidal rage, and who must be ritually killed in order for the rest of us to go on living with the contradictions in our lesser hearts.
In modern times, the role of the exemplary sufferer has come to be played by artists. Non-artists depend on and cherish artists for giving pleasing form to the central experiences of being human. At the same, artists are resented, sometimes even homicidally, for the dubiety of their moral character and for bringing to consciousness painful truths that non-artists prefer to remain unconscious of. Artists will drive you crazy, and The Hundred Brothers is a perfect instance of the work of art that seduces you with its beauty and power and then maddens you with its craziness. It’s often hilarious, but there’s always a dangerous edge to the hilarity. When, for example, Doug is describing the complicated seating chart for the dinner table at which he and ninety-eight of his brothers gather in a scene reminiscent of the Last Supper, he notes that his own name, unlike all the others, is written in “bright orange,” and that he’s “never been able to figure out the logic behind this.” The orange writing recalls the fire that several brothers are building in the book’s opening pages and the flames that illuminate the primitive ritual with which the book closes; the color targets Doug like a hunted animal. And the whole comedy of his situation—he simultaneously knows and resists knowing that he’s his brothers’ beloved and hated scapegoat—is encapsulated in his putative inability to “figure out the logic.” Is the logic that Doug is the family’s devoted genealogist, the former star quarterback of the family football team, the trustworthy listener to whom others turn with questions about God, and the brother who nurses his psychically and physically wounded brothers at the expense of his own needs? Or is it (as his narrative gradually and comically reveals) that Doug is a chronic liar and an unrepentant thief of his brothers’ drugs and money, has a penchant for drinking too much and misbehaving, nurtures a bizarre fetish for his brothers’ footwear, and once, as the quarterback in a crucial game, fumbled away the football in his own end zone? Or is it (as seems most likely) that Doug is the family artist, the outsider who is also the family’s deepest insider, the brother who has taken it upon himself to annually assume the role of Corn King and perform “the nocturnal dance of death and the life that grows out of death”?
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.
When the brothers are all seated at the dinner table, one of them makes a call for better maintenance of the library: “As some of you may know, a slow drip, directly over Philosophy of Mind, has recently waterlogged and destroyed seventy to eighty percent of Cognitive Theory.” As in some kind of nightmare of paralysis, however, the brothers are able only to notice the library’s decay, not seriously combat it. Chandelier lights flicker, rainwater pours in, bats fly around, furniture is broken, food scraps are ground into once-valuable carpets. The entire novel is shadowed by the insight, or fear, or premonition, that postmodernity doesn’t lead us forward but backward to the primitive: that our huge and hard-won sum of knowledge will ultimately prove useless and be lost. Already in the book’s early pages, describing the eighteenth-century pornography that some of the married brothers are huddled over, Doug has intimations of this loss. “The Age of Enlightenment’s inattention to hygiene is well documented,” he remarks. “A certain syphilitic degeneracy lurks in these bookplate etchings of rheumy aristocrats making doggy love with their hats on.” In the latter half of the novel, the intimations of decay become a drumbeat, culminating in the brilliant scene in which Doug himself ecstatically, with his urine, amid the shelved works of Liberal Theologians, Antiquaries, and Bibliographers, “hoses down, as they say, a few literary masterpieces.” In the despair that grips Doug after this ecstatic moment, the dissolution of the library becomes increasingly indistinguishable from what’s happening to him. The man has become the world, the world has become the man; the solipsism is complete; the narrative has gone fully mad.
The craziness of The Hundred Brothers derives from its willingness to embrace, even celebrate, the dark fact that an individual’s life consists, finally, of an accelerating march toward decay and death. The novel is a Dionysian dream in which nothing, not even sanity, can escape the corrosive chaos of this circumstance; but its form is bravely Apollonian. It renders lonely solipsism universal and humane by way of rite and archetype and artistic excellence. What Nick Carraway says about his friend Jay Gatsby could also be said of the scapegoat Doug: he turns out all right at the end. The rest of us, his brothers and sisters, awaken from the harrowing dream refreshed and better able, as Doug says with equal parts of irony and hope, to “prosper and thrive.”
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Jonathan Franzen
Begin Reading
Also by Donald Antrim
Acclaim for Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers
About the Author
Copyright
MY BROTHERS Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack—all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years—and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own “lost boy” way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings—the artist’s multiple renderings for a larger work?—portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the “new millennium” psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you’ll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as “an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways”), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated “perfect” brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of “sexual language” in eleven types of social insects—all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he’s fled the vicinity, he’s right here under our noses, he’s using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing)—all my ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker’s ashes.
It was a wretched, pewter-colored day. The red library walls were haunted by shadows and light cast from a multitude of low-wattage reading lamps that haloed the tables on which they sat illuminating our laps as we flopped down on sofas and chairs overhung by English hunt prints and the heads of game animals, mounted, desolate, African, gazing out from rectangles of wall framed in wood shelves crowded with Victorian matched sets and works by obscure poets.
“I hate this room. It stinks of death,” whispered Virgil, wedged beside me on a love seat. Virgil often felt, or he seemed to feel, to have felt, since his childhood, frightened and oppressed. It was impossible to say or do anything to make life less unpleasant for him. Nevertheless, we tried. “Lighten up,” I told him. A line of our brothers scuffed past us in search of places to sit. The library was filling with male energy and low sounds of voices saying, “Hey, man, scoot over and make space.” Soon it would be standing room only. The musty air would grow lush with our smells of sweat, shaving lotions, exhaled humid breaths. God help us. Already Virgil was hunched over on our shared cushiony seat, looking moist and claustrophobic with his head hovering between his knees, watery eyes scrutinizing the carpet. “Try reading a magazine,” I suggested. Then, from a distant corner of the room—a crash, the jolting shatter of glass exploding, a lamp going down. This always happens when we crowd together in the red library: someone trips on a cord or backs into a three-legged table flaunting a bud vase, or hurls his body too heavily onto a chair, with the result that some objet or piece of heirloom furniture winds up noisily destroyed; it’s alarming and inevitable and laughable. Today’s mishap appeared to be the work of Max, who, clearly startled by the overturned light’s impact, the noisy report of breaking china, stopped a moment to stare down at the lamp cord snarled around his ankle, the black electrical line snaking across the floor through porcelain strewn in brilliant white ruin near his shoes (the tiny conical lampshade having sprung free and gone flying, nearly knocking another lamp from another table), before looking up to gaze slowly here and there around the hushed room, then ask no one in particular, “Did I do that?”
Poor Maxwell. Ever since his return, last month, from a pharmacological botanical specimen–gathering expedition, he’s been noticeably agitated, clumsy and distracted in the manner of one plagued by either fever or crisis. Apparently, something strange had happened in Costa Rica, and now Max was walking into things and breaking them, at a rate of about one electrical fixture, decorative serving dish, potted plant, or item of statuary every three days.
“What’s wrong with him, do you think?” Virgil whispered barely audibly in my ear.
Together we watched Max kneel unsteadily down among the lamp shards. Siegfried and Stephen, both standing in Max’s vicinity when the accident happened, came over and crouched beside their brother, helped him collect fragments, which they all painstakingly swept—their six outstretched, middle-aged hands raking and pawing the carpet for nuggets of porcelain and indiscernible, translucent bulb splinters—into a tidy pile. I was astounded by how fat Stephen had become. Just looking at him made me want a whiskey and soda. He scooped a quantity of particles into his soft hands and trotted off toward the fireplace, where, despite the fact that it was sufficiently warm in the room—and would become, what with the steady infiltration of more and more of our bodies, suffocatingly so—old Hiram was leaning on his walker, performing his customary patriarchal act of rudely supervising construction of yet another of his stupendous, raging fires.