The Brothers K

Fashioned after Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Kamarazov, David James Duncan's The Brothers K follows the mother, father, and six children of the Chance family from the 1950s to the 1970s. The Chances, a quintessentially American family, experience dreams deferred, mental illness, the Vietnam War, and profound loss while practicing their two great religions: Christianity and baseball.

Kincaid Chance, the youngest of the four boys, tells his family's story starting from his childhood. With potential professional baseball player Hugh as their patriarch, the Chance family is heavily focused on the sport.

Hugh and Laura have four sons and twin daughters: Kincaid, Irwin, Everett, Peter, Beatrice, and Winifred.



Hugh decides to supplement his baseball income by working at the pulp mill. When a factory accident causes Hugh to lose the use of the thumb on his pitching hand, he is forced to give up playing baseball.

Laura, a hyper-religious, fundamentalist Christian, claims that Hugh losing his baseball career was God's will. Laura's religious fanaticism leads to many disagreements within the family, some of which cause her to leave the boys temporarily, take the twins, and move in with her brother. When Laura moves back, the arguments don't stop, and she sometimes reacts with violence toward her sons.

Hugh is initially despondent after his accident, but Kincaid convinces him to keep trying. Hugh sets up a pitcher's mound in the backyard, quits smoking, and begins running. Determined to return to the game that he loves, Hugh has a surgery to reconstruct his mangled thumb using bones from his big toe. The operation is successful, and he becomes a backup pitcher and pitching coach for his old team. Meanwhile, Laura starts her own cleaning business.



The Chance boys all go to college. Peter heads to the East Coast, becomes fascinated with Eastern religions, and eventually wins a scholarship to visit India. There, he experiences culture shock, finding himself disillusioned by the heat and poverty of the country.

Everett becomes a student protestor against the Vietnam War. He joins the hippie movement, becomes an atheist, and dodges the draft by moving to Canada. Things don't work out with his girlfriend, Tasha, and Everett becomes depressed.

Irwin, a poor student, drops out of college when he discovers his girlfriend is pregnant. He gets a job to support his new family. Despite being a devout Seventh Day Adventist, and therefore a conscientious objector, he is soon drafted. During the Vietnam War, Irwin has some traumatic experiences that take a toll on his mental and emotional health. He attacks his Captain during an episode and is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital in California.



Peter and Everett return from India and Canada. Everett gives a speech at Laura's church and is then thrown in prison. Hugh gives up his baseball career and all of the Chances, save Everett, meet with some of Laura's congregation at the gates of Irwin's hospital. Finally, Irwin is released.

Together again, the family learns that Hugh has lung cancer and is dying. Irwin begins caring for Hugh and does so until his death. He becomes fascinated with woodstoves and starts a company with Peter. Kincaid gets a job working for Peter and Irwin. Everett gets out of jail, reconciles with Tasha, and marries her. The two have a child.

As the story closes, all of the Chance children are married with families of their own.



The most prominent themes in the novel concern religion and baseball. Each family member is immersed in one of the two obsessions. Hugh governs the baseball congregation made up of Everett, Kincaid, and Peter while Laura is able to pass her religious fanaticism on to the twins and Irwin.

Duncan makes several references to Dostoyevski's similarly-titled work throughout the novel, and said in an interview that he read The Brothers Karamazov two years into writing The Brothers K. "I found there were a lot of parallels," he told The New York Times, "But the main thing I was thinking is the baseball statistician’s lingo. A "K" is a strikeout, which is a personal failure. I love the fact that a man who is considered a success in baseball has a 30 percent success rate -- in other words, a 70 percent failure rate."

There are several places in the novel where the family seems to strike out. Hugh losing his dream job, Everett and Irwin facing imprisonment, and Hugh dying of cancer could all be considered "strikeouts," but still the brothers are resilient and seem to win the "game" by the end of the novel.



Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that details the lives of a negligent patriarch and his sons. While Dostoyevski's three brothers eventually kill their father, Duncan's version is a little more muted. Instead, the doldrums of domestic life without his beloved game kills Hugh's spirit and weakens him to the point of death. Like Dostoevsky, Duncan chooses to separate his novel into different books, though far fewer, and religious zeal also appears in one of the Karamazov brothers.