“Brothers”
Book 1, chapter 15; Book 2, chapter 24
Characters
1.15 Two brothers (Ray and Warren, Warren the eldest), Warren’s beautiful daughter (name “forgotten”), Ray’s Daughter, Ray’s Son (Warren), their wives (unnamed).
2.24 two brothers (Ray and Warren) and their wives (unnamed).
General Subject/ Plot
1.15: Two brothers share everything but their relationship sours and they grow apart. It’s never stated what goes wrong with their relationship.
2.24: two brothers conduct affairs with each other’s wives.
Motifs
1.15 Ray, Warren, beautiful girl, girl dead at 23 (here a car crash), homburg, lucky strikes, dentist, movies (Cagney et al.) credit investigator,
2.24 Rockefeller Center, cigarettes, infidelity, alcohol, “Prisoner of Love”, three deuces, purple tie, jesus, happy, party
Notes
The first “Brothers” strongly correlated with the second “A Familiar Woman” — Strawberry Blond, dentistry, Oldsmar Florida. It deals with two brothers gradually growing apart. They both have Claire-like daughters, one having died at twenty-three, the other notable for her beauty and premature death. Something dark also hangs over one of these Claire-like daughters, which causes the separation. One guesses it is incest.
The second “Brothers” tells a reverse story of two brothers growing closer together through cheating on each other’s wives, and somewhat invokes the second “Pair of Deuces” both through the mention of “Three Deuces” and the similar situation of two married couples changing partners.
The first is movie-related while the second is song/ music related…. (On the roof, holiday season, three deuces, purple tie, jesus, happy, twenty-five years ago, Rockefeller Center, “Charms“?)… Is there any reason to believe these are not the same Ray and Warren in the two chapters? [There are a couple details that make it unlikely: that the brothers of the first married late, that the given occupations of the two sets of brothers don’t correspond)… What to make of the fact, in the first, that (1) both Ray and Warren have “Claire-like” daughters (one for being exceptionally beautiful and the other for having died at age twenty-three) and that Ray’s son is named Warren? There almost seems a kind of ratio at work… Haven’t seen Strawberry Blond but a look at the plot summary suggests a parallel with these chapters.
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