The Hundred Brothers
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First edition cover
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| Author | Donald Antrim |
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| Cover artist | Jacket design by Lynn Buckley. Photograph: Willinger / FPG |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Crown |
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Publication date
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1997-01-28 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 188 pp (first edition, hc) |
| ISBN | 9780517703106 |
The Hundred Brothers is a 1997 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The substance of the novel consists of the nocturnal reunion of one hundred brothers in the library of their ancestral home, as they attempt to locate and inter the ashes of their deceased father, an insane monarch, drink heavily, and manifest a variety of mildly homicidal sibling rivalries. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998.[1] In his introduction to the novel, Jonathan Franzen wrote, "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." [2]
Plot summary
In the book's opening sentence Antrim names 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."[2]
The story takes place in the enormous library of the family's ancestral mansion, from the window 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. The incidents that occur on this single night are often farcical, often frustrating to the story's narrator, Doug—who is one of the hundred brothers—and an intense, vivid specificity is maintained throughout the narrative. "Taken together [the episodes] amount to a 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."[2]
Style
A plurality of critics responding to The Hundred Brothers mention Antrim's rigorous control over the narrative.[3][4]
The novel is a feat of exclusion and inclusion. Excluded from the narrative are: women (including the mother or mothers of the hundred brothers), children, any reference to a particular place or year, any realistic accounting of how there came to be so many brothers, how they fit into a single house, and what their lives outside of the house are like. Within these 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, homosexual cruising, anxieties about incontinence, penis size and middle-age weight gain. "The book also, despite its brevity, contains a deftly telecoped genealogy of human knowledge and experience, reaching from pre-history up through a very belated present day in which civilization seems on the brink of collapse."[2]
