Summer Reading

Chang and Eng: A Novel

Plume, 323 pp., $13 (paper)

Darin Strauss' colossal first effort begins and ends in Wilkesboro, NC, the dusty mountain town where conjoined twin brothers Chang and Eng Bunker settled during the mid-1800s. It begins and ends, more importantly, with their deaths. "This is the end I have feared since we were a child ... I too am done," Eng thinks upon waking to find his brother has died in his sleep. "You are gone now, Chang, and I am no longer incomplete. I love you boundlessly."

It is a moment of singular emotion, one that illustrates Strauss' most notable achievement in a historical novel rippling with notable achievements. In short, the author's sympathy for history's original "Siamese twins" has gradually become ours. On page one, we're speeding past a funeral procession, anxious to get where we're going, while 300 pages later we're the mourners, devastated that we've gotten there. The pages in between comprise a rumbling, whimsical eulogy for two men who lived as one for 62 years. Chang and Eng is more fiction than fact, as good novels always are, and is told with a yearning urgency from Eng's memory. Inherently exploitative, Strauss' debut pokes and prods at that urgency much like 19th-century doctors and newspapermen did to the "fleshy, bendable, 7-inch-long ligament resembling a forearm" that connects the twins. Their story is channeled through their suffocating fear of estrangement -- whether from family or women or anyone, really -- and fear is one of the few things that unite them. Eng is a stoic, a voracious reader of Shakespeare who aches for separation from his brother; Chang is a boyish showman with bad English who grins and chuckles his way through their burlesque performances. During their turbulent lifetime we meet such characters as King Rama III, P.T. Barnum, a 12-year-old, pre-reign Victoria, and the Yates sisters (Chang and Eng's eventual wives) in such backdrops as Siam, New York, London, and North Carolina. We see industrialization and the Civil War, the North and the South. We see a struggle for humanity everywhere. Strauss merits comparison to García Márquez in his sense of time and place -- in his gorgeously painful fusion of setting and personal conflict -- not to mention his ambition and humor.

"In my dream the wounded Confederates did not drop; in the haze of gunsmoke they came asunder: each of the killed stood cleaved down the middle. And those cut apart made their wayward rounds, a gang of halves in a tipsy dance," Eng tells us, and his waking reality is no less frightening, no less affecting, when conveyed by this brave and generous newcomer.