In Last Comes the Egg, Duffy manages the incredible. Here is an American novel that brings into uncanny focus the mysteries of life, death and the lunar weirdness of adults - all as seen through the x-ray eyes of a kid. The kid's name is Frank Dougherty, and when he's twelve his extravagant mother fails him in the most profound way possible: she dies. In her wake, she leaves a new T-Bird his family can't afford and a host of troubling questions. Yet perversely, Frank feels more alive than ever. And, in all innocence, he fights back. Frank's father - as gravely wounded as his son and facing bankruptcy - is worse than no help. Soon, Dad's infatuated with a blonde who threatens to become Frank's anti-mother. Then Frank meets two other lost kids, one white, one black. The white kid, Alvy Loomis, is a bigoted, badass Star Scout, a master manipulator unsure of his parentage. The black kid, Sheppy Dwyer, is a fifteen-year-old orphan who figures he's thirty in "white boy years". The three steal a car and take off south. It's the early sixties, the days of the Freedom Riders. Alvy's after his mother, Frank's fleeing wedding bells and Sheppy's pursuing ghosts. For most of us it takes a lifetime to finally break the egg of childhood. These kids can't wait.
Duffy's second novel (following The World As I Found It, LJ 8/87) takes the form of a boy's narrative addressed to his dead mother. Frank Dougherty's father is a Mr. Fix-It, but even he can't repair the damage left by the mother's sudden death. Living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the turbulent 1960s, Frank recoils from the troubles in his own family only to encounter alcoholism, violence, and adolescent suicide in his largely dysfunctional neighborhood. After realizing that he has "totally forgotten how to play," Frank flees his home in a stolen automobile. With two buddies one the disturbed son of a war hero and the other a black orphan Frank experiences on-the-road lessons in sex and survival. Duffy's juvenile protagonists are literary descendants of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and the novel is populated with dozens of other memorable characters. One character is compared to an aerosol can with its contents under pressure. Such a metaphor could also describe this tragicomic novel, whose explosive tensions are kept barely contained. For all literary collections. Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews
The expectations raised by Duffy's astonishingly witty and entertaining first novel, The World As I Found It, which was based on the lives of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, are soundly met in his second. As a coming-of-age story (set in the early 1960s), the new novel is more mundane in concept than its predecessor; but Duffy's raw, off-center observations and syncopated prose cut new paths through well-trod territory. When Julie Dougherty takes ill and dies at age 38, her adolescent son, Frank, who narrates, and his father spin into separate, mad orbits in Corregidor, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Frank's father, the self-proclaimed Mr. Fixit of the neighborhood, soon begins dating Heidi, a younger, take-charge blonde who flirtatiously wrestles and cuddles with Frank. At the first opportunity, Frank turns his back on this family drama by taking up with Alvy Loomis, a teenager with a large, unruly family and a knack for plotting reckless, violent capers. Alvy, who's convinced that his sister Charlene is in fact his mother, steals a car and leads Frank and Sheppy, a motherless black kid, on a road trip through the American South to find and confront Charlene. During the journey, Frank comes to fear Alvy. Yet he realizes that, just as the laws of thermodynamics dictate that there's always "heat in cold," so is there always "love in hate." He sees that he can't hate Alvy or his own father without loving them, too. Against the backdrop of racial turmoil, soaking up the pop-cultural language and beat of the 1960s, Frank struggles to understand his childhood, his family and his motherless and bewildered friends. Duffy demonstrates the magic of seeing, showing how a vision of truth can turn misery into humor and pain into poetry. (Jan.)
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