This definitely isn’t Shirley Falls, where women wear dark blue, backless clogs with dark green socks, and spouses with large bellies wear matching fleece vests. And, unlike the hustle and bustle of New York, its buildings are empty and windows boarded up, where once “there had been coffee shops and magazine stores and bakeries.”

The similarity between the two disparate locations is the natural world — a world Strout paints with the grace of an Impressionist’s brush. An April day in Brooklyn bursts with the “exuberance” of forsythia under “skies that sometimes stayed blue all day.” A winter’s day in Maine almost seems warm, when “the snow sparkled, and the river sparkled, as though diamonds had been openhandedly flung throughout the air.” In the summer, the same greens burst from trees and parks and gardens — the city and small town both alive in Mother Nature’s verdant bliss. Even if you’ve never traveled to either place, Strout makes you feel like you’ve been there before.

Thankfully, she doesn’t save these descriptive gems for just landscapes. Her vivid imagery leaps off the page with great frequency when describing her unruly cast of characters.

As in any family, there will be sibling rivalries and jealousies. The Burgesses are no different. Childhood rancor, it seems, never really dies. Bob leaves Brooklyn and drives to Shirley Falls to help his sister and nephew — allowing Jim to keep his vacation on St. Kitts with Helen, his “snobbish” Connecticut wife. In jest, Bob describes himself as a “self-loathing Puritan.” Susan corrects, “You are a self-loathing weirdo.”

Strout’s piquant prose elucidates the cutting relationship between the twins:

“So they were at war, as they had always been. He was captive in his coat, freezing cold, and with nothing to drink. She knew it, and kept him that way. Susan never drank, as their mother had not. Susan probably thought that Bob was an alcoholic, and Bob thought he was almost, but not quite, an alcoholic, and he thought there was a big difference between the two.”

In New York, Bob helps the downtrodden, the misunderstood, even the guilty, but in Maine — in his sister’s home — demons of the past sidetrack him; his insecurities, fueled by sibling scorn, bubble to the surface, and shame sets in.

It turns out Bob’s relationship with Jim isn’t much better. While Helen seems enamored with Bob’s sensitivities and often comes to his defense, Jim ridicules Bob over his job, his use of the English language, his dorm-like living arrangements — a foreshadowing of things to come — and unfurls a litany of epithets that would snuff out even the world’s worst playground bully: “knucklehead,” “jerkoid,” “slob-dog,” “retard,” “incompetent fucking mental case,” “cretinized bozo,” to name just a few. It gets tiresome, actually — this name-calling — and it should be for Bob too. But instead, he looks at Jim and feels his “heart unfold with love.” Bob’s self-worth, as thin as vellum, has taken a backseat to the pain, fear and disillusionment of those around him.

Juxtaposed with this rivaling, recalcitrant family uninterested in their “New England lineage stretching back to the 1600s” is the family of Abdikarim Ahmed, a Somali refugee and owner of a café. Symbolically, he is the father the Burgess kids never had, as Abdikarim tries to keep his community together in a “world where constantly one turned and touched incomprehension.” His is the face of Janus, with whom readers of Strout’s novels are so familiar. Abdikarim is pious yet breaks fast. He believes he’s too old to learn English, yet later speaks the language of his new home in a clipped, stiff manner. He views Zach’s crime as post-9/11 retaliation against his religious community, yet becomes one of his greatest champions. In creating these contradictions, Strout has tried to portray Abdikarim as multifaceted as the other characters she has so adeptly created, yet there is something hollow about him, leaving the reader wanting more from the character drawn to represent an entire population of refugees.

The only other Somali to play a significant role in the novel is Haweeya, Abdikarim’s niece, who like her Christian counterparts often speaks in generalities about the Other. “In America, it is about the individual. Self-realization. Go to the grocery store, the doctor’s office, open any magazine, and it is self, self, self. But in my culture it is about community and family.” As the family’s story develops, however, Haweeya’s words appear hypocritical, if not entirely false. And yet, upon greater consideration, she emerges as a critical figure in the novel, serving as a mouthpiece for Strout’s underlying message in The Burgess Boys: all humans, when placed in certain situations of discomfort, half-truths and incomprehension have the capacity to slip into lighter and darker shades of intolerance.

Strout places everyone in the crosshairs of prejudicial tendencies, which prevents the novel from slipping into cliché, but does, sadly, lessen the humor so often found in her other works. Even New Yorkers living in a grand social experiment of multiculturalism are not immune to such feelings. The pages are filled with bigoted, intolerant jousts at the Other — from Mainers outraged at the way others imitate their pronunciations, to their repugnancy over the sound of the Somali language, to rumors that Somalis keep chickens in their cupboards, to New Yorkers irritated with the brashness of Germans and Asians, to gentrified women of Park Slope and their indifference to the plight of African women, to Swedes declaring Somalis a violent people, to Somalis thinking bland Americans only care to instill entitlement in their children — the torrential hailstorm of humanity’s inability to accept otherness is seemingly… intolerable.

There is a dark side to each of us regardless of class, ethnicity, nationality, race or gender; we can either disavow ourselves from it or let it control us — the choice is ours. Early in the novel, Jim declares: “The Burgesses aren’t fugitives. That’s not who we are. We don’t hide.” Yet, everyone, on some level, is a fugitive in the novel, seeking refuge from war, the unknown, the Other, the past and even the future. Such refuge can be liberating but it can also be imprisoning. By the end of the novel, the proverbial family closet doors have been flung open, and there is a possibility of transformation for all.

But that reckoning, of course, depends on whether we are to believe the unreliable narrator’s conclusion. I, for one, recommend going back to her prologue. It’s well worth a second, or even third, read. It might just be, as our narrator’s mother warned, that nobody ever knows anyone…

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Featured image: “The Burgess Boys,” a novel by Elizabeth Strout. Photo Courtesy of: Random House.