Sibling Rivalry

A.M. Homes’ short story Brother on Sunday is an interesting read. It deals with the problems of sibling rivalry in our intensely competitive postmodern society.

The plastic surgeon Tom is expecting a visit from his dentist brother Roger. We’re on a beach somewhere in the US. Tom is married to Sandy, and they are part of a group of friends holidaying together. Tom is a bit insecure existentially, and he has an extremely narcissistic personality. Right from the start we meet him when he is examining himself in the mirror and making small corrections in his skin with Botox.

Tom is “in awe”, “mesmerized by the human body”. He is constantly taking pictures of people on the beach. In short: A kind of voyeur, the voeyrism compensating for his lack of trust in other people and his deplorable lack of communication skills. Sandy, on the other hand, is a very consummate communicator, and she has to deal with his almost childlike tantrums, which occur when Roger comes along.
    He has a big minority complex to Roger, a minority complex which apparently originates in early childhood, and which has been perpetuated by a mother who seems to prefer Roger. Roger is a love child. Tom prehaps should have  been a miscarriage.

Perhaps the interpretation is too easy and obvious:

“Was your father really a butcher?” the visiting sister of one of the friends asks.

“Yep. And he really talked about women’s bodies like they were cuts of meat. ‘Boy, she’s got good veal cheeks! That girl would make one hell of a standing rib roast, trussed, bound, and stuffed.’ And then he’d laugh in a weird way. My mother thought of herself as an artist. She signed up for a life-drawing class when I was eleven and she took me with her, because she thought I’d appreciate it. I just sat there, not knowing where to look. Finally, the instructor said, ‘Draw with us?’ I’d never seen a bare breast before—drawing it was like touching it. I drew that breast again and again. And then I glanced at my mother’s easel and saw that she’d drawn everything but the woman. She’d drawn the table with the vase, the flowers, the window in the background, the drapes, but not the model. The instructor asked her, ‘Where’s the girl?’ ‘I prefer a still-life,’ my mother said. ‘But my son, on the other hand, look how beautiful he thinks she is!’ ”

“Was she being mean?” He shrugs.

It seems to be the case of an adverse identification process, Tom identifying with the “artist mother”, Roger with the crude “butcher father”. Or perhaps, this is how Tom in his misery and self-pity wants to see things.  The mother is bashful about nakedness, and her reaction to Tom’s faschination with the female breast helps to turn his faschination into the fake representation and “manipulation” of nakedness in the alchymist craft of the plastic surgeon.

    The human body and gender identity are constructs, seens to be the message. But apparently Tom is not capable of constructing himself out of the consequences of parental belittling:

He thinks about the time he volunteered to go on a mission with a group of doctors who were heading to an impoverished spot to do good for five days—a kind of spiritual recompense for the fortune that modern elective cosmetic procedures had brought them. He fixed cleft palates, treated skin rashes, gave routine immunizations. “I’ve heard of it,” his mother said. “What’s it called again, Doctors Without Licenses? Maybe next time you could take Roger—he’s an excellent dentist. Everyone needs a good dentist, rich or poor. It would be nice if the two of you did something together.”

It could end in a fight, and the two brothers are nearly on the point of splitting up, but Sandy’s clever conflict management prevents this. In a way it peters out at the end.  The author lets it end in the brothers “pummelling each other on the sofa”. “Butcher and an artist”, Roger says at the end.  Two brothers living in the long shadows of their parents, living through a process of adverse identification and character construction – far from the ideals of the post modern time they live in. A. M. Homes is capable of doing better than that!

Sibling rivalry is not only a fictional construct. It takes place in front of our eyes in the contest for the Labour leadership in Britain. The popularity of the theme of sibling rivalry makes it possible for the two Milliband brothers, David and Ed, to overshadow the three other candidates for the Labour leadership crown.

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