PHOENIX

A beautifully written, painfully frank memoir about a death in the family, and a meditation on the fragile bonds of kinship

in the modern world. Dolan was the last of five children born to increasingly distracted parents. He was, by necessity, closer to his three sisters and to his brother, John, who was 11 years his elder. “John,” he remembers, “taught me how to throw a ball, bait a hook, sight a rifle . . . how to ride a motorcycle and drive a stick shift.” Dolan's recollections of the fierce affection and admiration he felt for his brother, who seemed to have an almost effortless command of life's most interesting activities, alternate with passages sketching in a larger portrait of his strained family life with an anxious mother and a taciturn, distant father. These recollections range from Dolan's childhood to the moment when, at the age of 28, he is summoned home from Paris after John is horribly burned in a work-related explosion. Dolan has to struggle to equate the semiconscious, unrecognizable figure in the burn unit with memories of his handsome, diffident brother. Dolan's attempts to puzzle out the course of his brother's life inevitably leads him back to an attempt to piece together the random memories of family events and conflicts into a larger scheme. The shifting balances, the resentments and longings that work themselves out in any family, are brought into focus by John's lingering death, as Dolan, his sisters, and his mother, struggling under the weight of grief that “covered us like a blanket,” must each come to grips with the loss and with what it tells them about their own lives. Dolan unflinchingly peels away the layers from a family's secrets and fears, and in doing so creates a memorial to a brother

lost too soon—as well as a powerful, unsettling lament for the ways in which life's hard realities can diminish one's dreams.