Insert baseball metaphor here

Here’s a confession for you:  Baby Boomers bug me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of Baby Boomers.  My mother happens to be one as well as many other members of my family.  Some of the best mentors and teachers I’ve had in my life have been Baby Boomers, but man when they all get together do they ever bug me.  

Their need to always stay young or their inferiority complex about their parents’ generation or the crippling effect they’re having on pension plans because they want to be retired for 40 years before dying.  50 is the new 30!  Blow me.  

So imagine my surprise when I loved The Brothers K by David James Duncan, a family drama set in the 1960s.  We follow the Chance family through the eyes of a middle child as he, his brothers and sisters, grow up worshiping their father, baseball and navigating their way through adolescence, adulthood and Vietnam.

I wrote that last word (Vietnam if you’ve already forgotten), with a little trepidation.  Baby Boomers love to write/talk/sing about Vietnam and, not surprisingly, it bugs me.  So much has been written about it and said about it and copied about it, that most aspects of literature/television/art that references it feels cliched.  Surprisingly, though, I don’t hold it against Duncan or his novel when the story stalls while he writes his obligatory Vietnam hate-letter.  A brother gets drafted and sent to Vietnam unjustly and he has a breakdown from it?  Color me bored.

I should hold it against Duncan and his story, I know.  The thing is, by the time it happens I’m in love with all members of the Chance family to such a degree that I don’t care.  
These characters become so real so quickly that I end up just wanting to spend time with them, regardless of the circumstances.  Duncan hero worships the Dad and baseball a bit, but no more than most Baby Boomers hero worship their Dad and baseball.  Besides, Duncan at least acknowledges faults with both, something a lot of Baby Boomers still have trouble doing.  

These beautifully flawed, broken characters manage to grow up while themes of theology, philosophy and morality swirl around them.  Again, this kind of mentality from Baby Boomers (“We questioned everything!  All of us!  All the time!) wears on me, but Duncan handles it beautifully with his messy characters, love of baseball and adoration for father figures.