I know I haven’t really posted in nearly a week, but when you’re given a 645-page book that you’re supposed to read by the 15th, blogging just kind of falls by the wayside. After a while, though, it was no longer an obligation that kept me away, but a real desire to finish this book… a desire to know, to experience, and to feel what this book had to offer.

I just finished it — it’s by David James Duncan, by the way — and I’m flabbergasted (sorry, the book’s language is rubbing off on me) as to what to say about it. Hubby asked yesterday if I was enjoying it. “Yes,” I replied. “Very much so.” What’s it about? Well… that’s the problem. See… it’s about a family, the Chances, and their lives, their experiences, their joys, their heartbreaks, their mistakes, their reconciliations… there really isn’t much of a “plot” or a “storyline”, but the story telling is so wonderful that I never noticed. The narrator is Kincade, the youngest of the Chance brothers (though there are twin sisters younger than him), and it’s the observations, wit, soul, and love that Duncan puts in this character that pulls the lives of these people from the ordinary and mundane to the spectacular and transcendent.

At times I laughed — howled, to use bookspeak again — so hard that I figured this had to be the funniest book I’d read in a long time.

Case in point: made up “scriptures” spouting out of the mouth of the brothers.

Deuteronomy three, sixteen: “And they who pinroll the dough shall be airplaned. Verily, unto illness shall they be flown about the yard. Unto airsickness, yea, and unto every other type of disaster shall they be propellered. And their poor mama shall watch though it cleaveth her heart in twain to do so!”

But not two pages later, Duncan had me musing over his observations of people and religion. Here’s one from the middle of the book.

Everett stood up and started pacing. “What I was feeling, Winnie,” he said, “was that maybe the reason prayers never get answered is that everybody prays the wrong way, and for the wrong things. People ask God for good things all the time, and never offer anything in return. But if God exists, if He really made the world and is all-powerful and all-wise and all that, then I figure He made all of the world, including the bad stuff. So if He ‘saw that it was good’, He meant just that. From His point of view, bad stuff must somehow be ‘good,’ or at least must serve some sort of divine purpose. I was trying to give God the benefit of the doubt, see? And look where it got me!”

And a half-chapter after that, I was crying.

Would I recommend this? In a heartbeat. But not to everyone. See, the one drawback, the one that will keep people like many in my in-person book group from enjoying this wonder, is the language. It’s, well, extensive and colorful. But, I suppose, when you write a book about baseball, milling towns and the Vietnam War, extensive and colorful language is going to be a part of that book. It didn’t bother me. And if you can get past that, by all means, I would whole-heartedly recommend this book.

If not, well, you’re life won’t be worse because of it. But you are missing one heckuva book.