LAST COMES THE EGG : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: deja vu all over again
Review: I knew Bruce as a phibeta kappa at the University of Md. I "reviewed" this book . I picked it up and set it down. Bruce is/was a talented individual but I thought the length and time involved was too much ( as Shaw remarked on Joyce).Great talent. Great length. In interpretation, realize Bruce's mother also died in his youth. Art imitates life.

Rating:
Summary: Unearths forgotten memories
Review: Reading this book reminds me of growing up in the 60's... particulary how weird it was visiting other kid's houses. At that age, I pretty much thought the rest of the world lived the same way I did (compulsively clean Mom), so it was like visiting a foreign country when I'd see other kids bedrooms, and smell the differences between my house and their house.

I hadn't really thought about stuff like that for 20 years... and reading this book brought it all back home. Very, very enjoyable and very, very funny (but tragic-fun... the best kind).

Rating:
Summary: Find Yourself Here
Review: The World As I Found It (Duffy's first book) was a strong, irresistable book, which got behind you and pushed you headlong through the story of an opaque philosopher. It was great, and I wondered how Duffy could follow it. Last Comes the Egg could easily have been titled The World As I Found It too, but what a different world it is. Gone are the lofty havens of great thinkers, the vaulting halls of Cambridge and the battlefields of Europe. Instead we have suburban Maryland in the sixties, a place coming from nowhere, and not going to anywhere either. And in place of the sheer power, we have a very subtle, quiet story, which opens itself up to be explored.

The story all happens in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, in a middle-class neighborhood of nobody in particular. Into this life of complete unimportance are thrust the children, who, like their parents, cannot accept their own insignificance, and struggle to find a place of importance in a world that is indifferent to them. In a very different journey of discovery, these children seek in themselves to find who they are, even as they look around them to discover what role, what performance other people like best. And in this microcosm of identity and conformity, the attentive reader will find pieces of himself (and herself) scattered around. And hopefully they will come away with a better understanding.

I found the book tremendously rewarding, and a powerful window on adolescence in America. Duffy aims for and hits the real heart of the end of childhood, and brings out what everyone feels as they teeter on the edge of adulthood - "Wait - I thought there was something more..." In the emptiness of real life, we are shown how everyone finds something to latch onto, to call important, to be their own special illusion. We make ourselves into heroes, protecting our precious, fragile eggs, until some few of us find the strength to let it fall.