Last Comes the Egg; A Novel

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Robert Sherbow (Author photograph). 359, [3] pages. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Bruce Michael Duffy (born June 9, 1951) is an American author. He is best known for his novel The World As I Found It, a fictionalized account of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a prominent 20th-century philosopher. Duffy does extensive historical research for his biographical novels and then crafts fiction from what he learns. In October 2010, The World As I Found It was republished as a classic by the New York Review of Books. Duffy has also contributed to Harper's Magazine, Time and Life, among others. Duffy also wrote Last Comes the Egg. This piece, Duffy's second novel, was received with general praise. Salondotcom praised the novel for its originality and tragic humor. In 1988, Duffy won a Whiting Award and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Joyce Carol Oates named The World As I Found It as one of "five great nonfiction novels", calling the book "a bold and original work of fiction" and "one of the most ambitious first novels ever published". Two white boys and a Black boy in the early 1960s set out in a stolen car to find the love that is absent from their lives in the form of family or friends. Last comes the Egg is an American omelet that offers a fresh new language and psychology to the literature of childhood. Because, as Frank discovers as he chisels away, it is finally a beautiful mystery, cracking the luminous egg of life. Derived from a Kirkus review: Holden Caulfield lives again, in this beguiling seriocomic tale. Ten years ago Duffy's first novel, The World as I Found It, was one of the most highly praised debuts of the 1980s. Its successor, a comic bildungsroman set in suburbia and on the road in 1960, is not a bit less praiseworthy. The story concerns Frank Dougherty, a Maryland teenager and the only child in an energetic, self-analytical, just slightly crazy family that would fit somewhere between Salinger's Glasses and Cheever's Wapshots. When his mother unexpectedly takes ill and dies, Frank's increasingly confused relationship with his stunned father pushes him toward intimacy with neighboring families he both hopes and fears will take him in, and then complicity with two other lost and drifting kids, an orphaned black named Sheppy and Frank's antagonist and closest friend Alvy, a Boy Scout and altar boy who's given to hot-wiring cars and to spasms of inexplicable violence. The trio steal a car and head south, encountering such wonders as a pair of nubile and willing high- school girls, and a gentle and helpful black family who give Frank a lesson in race relations that Duffy spells out a little too baldly. The novel hums along agreeably, powered by Frank's high-energy, ribald, plaintive voice and by several adroit variations Duffy plays on the controlling metaphor, which describes the process of thinking oneself inside unfamiliar situations or other people's skins and making yourself understand them. That's sort of what a fine novel like this one does. Let's hope we don't have to wait another decade for Duffy's next one.