Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Nan A. Talese on March 4, 2014

The Hanway brothers, born on the same day in three consecutive years, grow up in a London neighborhood. Their mother absents herself from the home when the oldest, Harry, is ten. Their father, a failed writer working as a nightwatchman, allows the boys to fend for themselves. Harry is athletic and adventurous; Daniel is scholarly and gay; Sam is melancholy, considers work to be a form of death, and might not be entirely connected to reality. In middle school, the brothers begin to drift apart ... or rather, they flee from each other and from the institution known as family. Each chapter that follows tends to focus on a single brother -- Harry pursues a career in journalism; Daniel pursues an education; and Sam drifts into an interior, quasi-religious life -- although their lives occasionally intersect.

What initially seems like a meandering character study (or perhaps a family study) eventually blossoms into a tightly woven story with an amusingly twisted plot. At some point, all three brothers become entangled with a notorious slumlord named Asher Ruppta, although no brother realizes that either of his other brothers also knows Ruppta. The brothers' lives intertwine in other ways that they don't realize. The cleverness of the plot assures a steady supply of surprises and the writing is full of wit and whimsy, although some aspects of the ending are incongruously bleak.

The tongue-in-cheek story consistently amuses. Three Brothers is not entirely without substance but the brothers are superficial and the targets of Peter Ackroyd's arrows (including wealthy hypocrites, sex-starved cougars, and literary academics who are jealous of younger or more successful writers) are fairly obvious. Three Brothers seems like a somewhat paler version of a novel Kingsley Amis might have written half a century ago, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it.

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