The Burgess Boys

“Bob had no idea what to do. Jim would know what to do. Jim had children, Bob did not.”

These short, declarative sentences express the certainty with which Bob regards himself as inferior to his older brother. Though he, too, is an attorney, Bob has been convinced that, compared to Jim, he is incompetent. Bob and Susan have grown to rely on Jim’s ability to fix any problem, no matter how large, and this belief in Jim’s competence and his own comparative incompetence has damaged Bob’s life.

“Helen closed her eyes behind her sunglasses and let her thoughts glide over to the Wally Packer days. What Helen had never told anyone was that those months had taught her what it must feel like to be the First Lady. One had to be ready for a camera click at any moment. One was building an image always. Helen understood this. She had been excellent at the job. […] And the excitement! Helen flexed her ankles. The late nights spent talking with Jim once the kids had gone to bed. Going over what had happened in the courtroom that day. He asked her opinion. She gave it. They were partners, they were in collusion. People said it must be a stress on a marriage, a trial like that, and Jim and Helen had to be careful not to burst into laughter, not to let it show: just the opposite, oh, it was just the opposite.”

Helen longs for a time in her past when her marriage was stronger: during the time when Jim’s career was at its peak. She ties her own happiness to his success and finds value in acting as a kind of pseudo-colleague in Jim’s professional life. Like Jim, she relishes the fame and positive attention that the case brought them.

“Part of what Pam felt when she read that was what she felt now remembering it: I am living the wrong life. It was a thought that made no sense. It’s true she missed the smells of a lab: acetone, paraffin, alcohol, formaldehyde. She missed the swoosh of a Bunsen burner, the glass slides and pipettes, the particular and deep concentration of those around her. But she had twin boys now—with white skin, perfect teeth, no burn marks anywhere—and lab work was a life of the past. Still, the variety of problems, parasitological and psychological, of this refugee population made Pam homesick for whatever life she was not having, a life that would not feel so oddly wrong.”

Like Bob, Pam struggles with her life’s purpose. Ironically, her divorce from Bob was spurred by her desire to become a mother. Once she has achieved this status, however, she questions whether it is truly the life she is meant to live. Her previous work as a scientist brought her a kind of meaning and fulfillment that she did not fully understand until it was gone. That sense of purpose is expressed here in the sensory details she remembers: the smells and sounds of the laboratory.

“Bob returned to the bar and understood that his evening was spoiled. He was a knucklehead, even Helen was mad at him. He had gone up to Maine and done nothing except respond like an idiot, panic, and leave their car up there. He thought of the gracious big-boned Elaine, sitting in her office with the fig tree, explaining so patiently the replication of the response to traumatic events, the masochistic tendencies he had because he felt he needed to be punished for a childhood act of innocence.”

Using free indirect style, the third-person narrator enters Bob’s perspective, expressing his thoughts as he berates himself after the Somali woman accuses him of nearly (but not actually) striking her with his car. He hears the voice of his former therapist, telling him that he responds this way because he feels that he must constantly seek penance for the accidental death of his father. Bob’s family has ingrained into his psyche the belief that he is a failure at everything he attempts.

“For Pam, who had no siblings, those weeks and weekends and summertimes in the Burgess home became something she later understood as having an inexpressibly deep importance and perhaps, too, undermining her marriage to Bob in the years to come. Because she could never stop feeling that Bob was her brother. She had taken his past—his terrible secret, which was never mentioned by anyone else—and benefited from the fact that Bob was their mother’s favorite, and she was the girl he chose to love.”

Here, Pam reflects on her getting to know the Burgess family when she was in college. She was welcomed and accepted by the family in a way that made her feel more like a sister than Bob’s girlfriend. Looking back, Pam believes that this played a role in harming her marriage to Bob. She notes, too, that though Barbara was particularly hard on her daughter, Susan, Pam did not have to work at all to gain Barbara’s approval.

“It was Susan [Helen] was swearing at as she unpacked, she realized, and the batty son, Zach. And Bobby as well. They had robbed her of a vacation. They had robbed her of a time of intimacy with her husband.”

Helen resents the way that Jim’s responsibilities extend to his adult children. She feels like she is in competition with Bob and Susan for Jim’s attention, and this makes her irritable. Though the true source of their lack of emotional connection is Jim himself, Helen continues to blame everyone except Jim until she learns of his infidelity.

“You know nothing about living in a house for grown-ups, instead of a graduate dorm. You know nothing about tuition for private schools, starting at kindergarten and going through college, at least. Nothing about housekeepers or gardeners, nothing about keeping a wife in—Just nothing, you cretinized bozo. Look, I’m working. Now go.”

Jim responds cruelly to Bob when Bob attempts to offer advice in Zach’s legal case. His response is typical of Jim’s treatment of Bob, as he constantly puts his brother down. Here, Jim portrays his enormous economic privilege as a burden that proves his adult seriousness. By comparison, he implies that Bob’s life is easy and therefore childish. That he cuts himself off after “keeping a wife in” suggests that he regards his marriage as simply another financial burden.

“But honestly, it did not seem possible right now, standing in this park of his childhood, to believe that his life in New York was real, that the couple across the street in their white kitchen actually existed, or the young girl who walked around her apartment so freely, or that he himself had spent so many evenings there looking out the window of his apartment. The image of himself seemed sad to him, but he knew when he sat in Brooklyn and looked out his window it did not seem sad, it was his life. […] But he wondered fleetingly what it was life for the Somalis, if they lived constantly with the sense of bewilderment he felt this moment, wondering which life was real.”

Being back in Maine causes Bob to take stock of his life in New York. He finds it unfulfilling and feels very far removed from it when he is physically away from his home. This causes him to experience a moment of empathy for the Somali refugees who, Bob supposes, are experiencing an extreme sense of confusion upon their displacement.

“Bob rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands in his pockets. What was this thing that Jimmy had? The intangible, compelling part of Jimmy? It’s that he showed no fear, Bob realized. He never had. And people hated fear. People hated fear more than anything.”

Bob carefully observes his brother, trying to identify what it is about him that makes him both so successful and so revered by others. He has an epiphany of sorts as he realizes that Jim is fearless. This fearlessness greatly contrasts with Bob, who lives in a state of constant anxiety. Later, Bob will revise his assessment and realize that Jim is, indeed, filled with fear.

“Standing in Roosevelt Park watching his brother speak with eloquence, Bob still accepted [his brother’s scorn]. He knew what he had done. The kindhearted Elaine, in her office with the recalcitrant fig tree, had one day suggested gently that to leave three small kids in a car at the top of a hill was not a good idea, and Bob had shaken his head, no, no, no. More unbearable than the accident itself was to hold his father responsible for it! He had been a small child. He understood that. No malice aforethought. No reckless endangerment. The law itself would not hold a child responsible. But he had done it.”

A large component of Bob’s trauma is his insistence on blaming himself for his father’s death and an unwillingness to allow anyone else in the family to share in this burden. This weight prevents Bob from moving forward in his life, as he has convinced himself that he is undeserving of a good life.

“For most of the nineteen years of Zachary’s life, Susan had done what parents do when their child turns out to be so different from what they’d imagined—which is to pretend, and pretend, with the wretchedness of hope, that he would be all right. Zach would grow into himself. He’d make friends and take part in life. Grow into it, grow out of it…Variations had played in Susan’s mind on sleepless nights. But her mind had also held the dark, relentless beat of doubt: He was friendless, he was quiet, he was hesitant in all his actions, his schoolwork barely adequate. Tests showed an IQ above average, no discernable learning disorders—yet the package of Zachness added up to not quite right. And sometimes Susan’s melody of failure crescendoed with the unbearable knowledge: It was her fault. How could it not be her fault?”

Just as Bob insists on bearing complete responsibility for his father’s death, so Susan insists on blaming herself for Zach’s flaws and weaknesses. It is only after Zach finally begins to thrive that Susan, in turn, thrives. She sabotages herself and Zach in a manner similar to Bob’s approach to his life.

“Two-thirds of the family had not escaped, this is what Bob thought. He and Susan—which included her kid—were doomed from the day their father died. They had tried, and their mother had tried for them. But only Jim had managed.”

At this point in the novel, Bob is convinced that he will be forever stuck in an unproductive, unhappy life. He attributes this state to being raised in Shirley Falls—as if the place itself is a force that he cannot overcome.

“‘Do you know what it’s like?’ [Jim] asked, looking up at Bob. ‘Watching the years go by, watching myself never say anything. When I was a kid I kept thinking, Today I’ll tell. I’ll come home from school and I’ll tell Mom, just say it. Then when I was a teenager I thought I’d write it down, slip it to Mom before school so she’d have all day to think about it. When I was at Harvard I still thought, I’ll send her a letter. But a lot of days I think, No, I didn’t do that.’ Jim shrugged.”

Jim pities himself after confessing to Bob that it was he, not Bob, who caused their father’s death. His self-pity comes across as narcissistic and egotistical and is in keeping with Jim’s character throughout much of the novel. He cares very little about the pain and trauma he has caused Bob by falsely accusing him.

“‘Let’s worry about that later,’ Bob said. ‘Let her be happy. God, I’m happy.’ Although sitting in the car next to Bob was the terrible conversation earlier on the hotel balcony; it was like a creepy little child poking at him in the dark, saying, Don’t forget. I’m here. But it did not seem real. With the excitement of Zach’s safety, it did not seem real or relevant. It did not belong in the car, or in Bob’s life.”

Unlike Jim, who is self-centered and pessimistic, Bob is able to experience happiness from the good fortune and success of others. Further, after the knowledge that he did not cause his father’s death, Bob is finally able to take steps to improve his life.

“People talked about anything. The Burgesses did not. It had taken Bob a long time to understand that this was a cultural difference, and certainly after half a lifetime in New York he talked more than he used to. But not about the accident. Which in Bob’s mind did not even have a name. It was just that thing that sat beneath the Burgess family, murmured of briefly, long ago, in the office of the kindhearted Elaine. To have Jim raise it after all these years (to claim it as his own!) was disorienting in its awkwardness, impossible to comprehend.”

The death of the Burgesses’ father has been a taboo subject that the siblings learned never to broach. This factor only worsened Bob’s trauma, as he never received acknowledgement from his family of how severely the event impacted him. That Jim mentions the accident, apropos of nothing, is shocking to Bob. The understated diction with which the narrator expresses Bob’s reaction suggests the power of this taboo: Jim initially experiences his brother’s confession not as a moral vindication but as a social faux pas.

“As those first days went by, anguish came to meet him. His mind, jumpy and distracted, told him, It’s not true, and if it is, it doesn’t matter. But this gave him no relief because the constant repetition of these thoughts told him otherwise. One night, smoking out his window, he drank far too much wine far too quickly—glass after glass—and it came to him with clarity: It was true, and it mattered. Jim, knowingly and deliberately, had wrongly incarcerated Bob in a life that wasn’t his […] In his state of drunken clarity, Bob saw his brother as someone unconscionable enough to almost be evil.”

Bob, so deeply accustomed to punishing himself for the death of his father, has great difficulty fathoming that another truth might be possible. For a moment, he tries to minimize the significance of the event (and Jim’s lie) in his life, but he then allows himself to be honest about the hurt Jim has caused him. His use of the phrase “wrongly incarcerated in a life that wasn’t his” harkens back to Jim’s job as a defense attorney—rather than coming to Bob’s defense as a child, Jim imprisoned him in a life of penance and guilt that should have belonged to Jim.

“And here was this boy, living, breathing, his dark eyes defenseless, assailable, and he was not what Abdikarim had imagined at all. Whatever caused the boy to roll a pig’s head through the mosque would remain a puzzlement to Abdikarim, but he knew now it had not been an act of evil.”

Abdikarim experiences genuine compassion and empathy for Zach when he realizes that Zach did not intend his act to be a hate crime. Though the event was traumatizing for Abdikarim, he is able to forgive Zach because he understands that he is a lost and naïve young person. This kind of tolerance is what many of the residents of Shirley Falls cannot truly extend to the Somali community.

“No, it was not the city that terrified Susan. It was her brothers. Who were they? How could they live this way? They were not the Bob and Jim from her childhood.”

Susan has a realization that both Jim and Bob have changed and evolved as they have aged. The three have, in a large sense, grown apart from one another, and Susan comes to understand this. Her insights are important because they ultimately help her change her own life.

“Bob, I have to be really straight here. You have always made me crazy. I’m tired of you, Bob. I am so fucking tired of you. Of your Bobness. I am so—Bob, I just want you gone. Jesus, please go.”

Though Jim has rudely asked Bob to leave the premises many times in the past, he asks Bob to leave his life permanently. This is evidence of just how narcissistic Jim is and displays his cold feelings toward Bob. Fortunately for Jim, Bob does not allow himself to be pushed aside so easily: In an ironic twist, it is Bob who will help Jim take steps to turn his life back around at the novel’s end.

“Mrs. Drinkwater agreed, ‘there’s no perfect way to live.’

Susan said, musingly, ‘When I was in New York, it went through my mind, maybe this is how the Somalis feel. I’m sure it’s not, well, maybe a little. But coming here where everything’s completely confusing. I didn’t know how to use a subway, and everyone was rushing past, because they knew. All the things people take for granted, because they’re used to it. I felt confused every minute. It wasn’t nice, I tell you.’”

Susan realizes that her visit to Manhattan provided her with a window into the Somali experience: She was able to experience, as they did, what it feels like to be displaced. In this moment, she is able to empathize with them in a way that she has not before.

“The longer they stayed the more American [their children] would become. They would be hyphenated people. Somali-American. What a strange thing, Abdikarim thought, to become hyphenated to a country now gratifying itself with the impression that all Somalis were pirates […] Americans really did not understand desperation. It was easier, and certainly more pleasing, to view the Gulf of Aden as a lawless place where Somali pirates reigned. A crazy parent, America was. Good and openhearted one way, dismissive and cruel in others.”

Abdikarim recognizes the reasons that motivate his niece to return to Somalia—culture and ethnic identity are important to him as well. He points out, here, that even though Americans have been surrounded by members of the Somali community, they still fail to understand them and hold on to incorrect and harmful biases. Abdikarim offers no solution for how to navigate this and has come to regard the duplicity of Americans as a condition he must accept.

“[Jim] looked at [Helen] with his small, frightened eyes. ‘I don’t know, Helen. I was supposed to take care of everyone. Growing up. That was my job. And then I left when Mom died, and I wasn’t there for Susan or Zach when Steve left, and Bob—”

As Jim reveals his infidelity to Helen, he voices his vulnerability and weakness for the first time. The expectations that others have placed on him to never fail and to achieve a high level of success at all times are a weight that he can no longer bear.

“[Jim] said, ‘Some of us are secretly in love with destruction. That’s what I think. Honestly? From the moment I heard about Zach throwing that pig’s head, I just knew deep down I was fucked. Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you. Could not get that song out of my head. But man, all my life—and especially when Zach fucked up, and the kids all gone off so the house was empty, and that stupid fucking meaningless job at the firm—I thought: Dead man going down. Just a matter of time.’”

As Jim unravels mentally near the end of the novel, he reveals how much he has truly been shattered on the inside. He has put forth an external guise of confidence and contentment, but when his infidelity is made known, Jim can no longer maintain this ruse. Him identifying with Zach here is important because Zach and Jim have been presented as foils throughout the novel.