From what Pandora can gather, he has few friends, no romantic attachments and no permanent home. For a man so heavy, her brother seems utterly adrift. But there’s evidence of depletion as well as expansion. For one thing, Edison has added about 220 pounds to his 165-pound frame, necessitating his removal from the airplane via wheelchair. When Pandora Halfdanarson’s older brother, Edison, lands in Iowa, he’s nothing like the rakishly handsome, semi-famous New York City jazz pianist she last laid eyes on four years ago. And in her narration, we find a frank rejoinder to Cain’s grumbled abdication of responsibility: “What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.”Īre you your brother’s keeper? Damn straight you are, whether you like it or not. In Shriver’s newest book, a 40-year-old woman’s decision to put her marriage on hold so that she can help her morbidly obese brother lose weight is cast as an act both responsible and irresponsible, caring and selfish. The author, whose “ We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003) depicted a teenage sociopath for whom the bonds of family were about as strong as worn-out rubber bands, has clearly been thinking a lot about filial ties, debts owed and sins unconfessed. In “Big Brother,” Lionel Shriver’s 11th novel, thick-skinned sibling tension is constantly flipped over to reveal its tender underbelly of devotion. Was it really that unreasonable for God to have expected that they kept close tabs on each other?
When God asked Cain if he knew where Abel was, the first murderer gave the first shifty answer: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Together, Cain and Abel had made up fully half of the world’s population.
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