The Burgess Boys

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout: a return to Maine

The Burgess Boys follows Jim and Bob Burgess back to Shirley Falls, the Maine town they left for New York. A childhood accident that killed their father has shaped both brothers, though their adult lives and temperaments differ. Jim is a successful corporate lawyer who has long belittled Bob; Bob works in legal aid and has continued to admire his brother. Their familiar imbalance seems deeply established until a family emergency requires them to return.

Their sister Susan stayed in Maine, and now her teenage son Zach is in serious trouble. She asks the brothers for help, bringing them back into the landscape and relationships of their childhood. Elizabeth Strout uses that return to expose tensions that distance has allowed them to carry without fully confronting.

Jim, Bob and Susan: the family roles that endure

The novel is particularly interesting for readers who recognise how adult siblings can fall back into old positions. Professional success and years in another city do not automatically erase the hierarchy established within a family. Jim and Bob’s contrasting legal careers also give their different forms of confidence and usefulness a concrete expression.

Susan’s request disrupts the idea that leaving a place means leaving its responsibilities behind. Her position differs from her brothers’ because she has remained in the town they escaped. The return therefore brings several versions of the same family history together: the experience of staying, the experience of leaving and the assumptions each sibling has made about the others.

The accident in their childhood gives those relationships a deeper pressure. A remembered event can become a fixed explanation for who someone is, even while unspoken tensions continue to change its meaning. Strout’s premise invites attention to what families accept as settled knowledge and what may still emerge when circumstances force them back into close contact.

Reading Elizabeth Strout’s family novel in hardback

This book suits readers who enjoy literary fiction about siblings, return journeys and the persistence of childhood in adult life. Zach’s trouble gives the plot an immediate reason to move, while the brothers’ homecoming opens a more complex examination of belonging, judgement and responsibility.

For discussion, the distinction between being successful and being emotionally dependable offers a useful focus. Another is how a family divides the labour of caring: some people leave, some remain, and each may misunderstand what the other has carried. The Burgess siblings make those tensions particular rather than abstract.

Buy the physical book The Burgess Boys in this English Simon & Schuster hardback edition. ISBN 9781471127373 identifies the 2013 hardback. It is a choice for readers drawn to Elizabeth Strout’s close attention to family relationships and to the unsettling experience of returning to a place whose influence has never entirely ended.