The Sisters Brothers

The novel does not follow a traditional narrative arc. Eli and Charlie travel from hitching post to hitching post on their way to meet their prey, so it’s essentially a road novel. The first half of the book is, to a large degree, a series of vignettes, which include, among other even stranger things, a witch’s curse, Eli discovering the joy of toothpaste, and a San Francisco local who delivers a charming monologue about how living in the city by the bay invariably makes you insane. These minisodes in the lives of our heroes are, blessedly, not brought around full circle to connect Crash-style. Rather they serve to let us get to know the brothers better, particularly Eli, whose simultaneously endearing and unnerving voice provides the novel with the legs it needs to get through its free-floating plot. Eli is a hired assassin who can witness and, indeed, participate in acts of horrible violence without so much as flinching, but he’s also essentially a young man at his first school dance, trying to figure out how to talk to the pretty girl and simmering with jealously at his older brother’s confidence. Eli wants a quieter life, to sleep in the same bed each night next to a kind woman, and he can’t shake the feeling that any one of the kind women he meets on his travels might fill that role. He reflects on his own complex emotions with heartbreaking simplicity: “I had nowhere to go and did not wish to be seen by anyone for fear they would recognize my sadness, and so for several minutes I simply stood in the hall, shifting my weight and breathing and attempting to clear my mind of every recognizable thought.” When the brothers zero in on their mark, the book settles into a more conventional plot structure, which is not to say it becomes conventional.