Phoenix: A Brother's Life by J. D. Dolan

From the Publisher

A beautifully rendered portrait of family and loss, of childhood and manhood by a supremely gifted writer evaluating the sum of his experiences and emerging with a moving work of the highest level.

J. D. Dolan was vacationing in Paris when he received a telephone call telling him to fly home immediately. A horrible accident had put his big brother John in a Phoenix burn unit with third degree burns over 90 percent of his body. As a child in 1960s Los Angeles, J. D. shared with John the unspoken bond that exists only between brothers. But as time passed and their excursions together ended, so did their conversation. For reasons known to John alone, they existed with each other only in silence, and now, in what would be their final days together, there would be precious few opportunities to talk. Phoenix is J. D. Dolan's personal reflections on the agonizing weeks spent coming to terms with his brother's fate, and his attempt to bring their relationship into perspective.

Los Angeles Times

Great writing is so rare and unexpected that it can take your breath away. The subject rarely matters. John McPhee transformed old tires into allegories for life, and Kazuo Ishiguro made the humdrum responsibilities of a butler ache with the pain of loneliness. In this slender memoir, J.D. Dolan condenses the pain of decades into tight, terse prose, and we are left shaken and moved.

His first story was about to be published, and he was in Paris, both giddy and sober at the thought of the new career in front of him. Then he got the call. "My whereabouts were no great secret," he writes, "but if somebody needed to reach me, he'd have to have a good reason or bad news to track me down. My brother-in-law Ernie had both." J.D.'s brother had suffered third-degree steam burns over 90% of his body during an inexplicable explosion at a power plant in the California desert where he worked. He had been taken to the burn unit at a hospital in Phoenix, and Dolan flew back to be at his side.

What follows is a story of family dysfunction so inexorable that it is a wonder that Dolan is able to have the awareness he does. He begins his memoir with 20 pages of starry-eyed nostalgia that signal we are about to enter a "Leave It to Beaver" universe. But the bonds of love and adoration that joined Dolan to his older brother and one of his older sisters when he was a small child only make the severing of those bonds that much more painful and perplexing.

When he arrives at the hospital, J.D. hasn't spoken to his brother John in almost five years. In his family, that's not even remarkable. At one point, his father didn't speak to J.D.'s sister for 10 years, and another of J.D.'s sisters hadn't spoken to his brother for three years. "My brother," Dolan writes, "was keeping up our grim family tradition." Just as he's about to condemn it, Dolan remembers that once he was so angry at his father that he didn't speak to him for six months. "Silence as punishment--I realized, as I sat there beside my brother at our father's funeral--was flowing in my veins too."

Dolan doesn't know why his brother became so bitter and withdrawn, and he never learns the answer. His brother lies in a semi-coma, his body a mass of hurting exposed flesh, while his sisters refuse to let him die and insist that heroic efforts be taken to save his life. They hope for a miracle, but Dolan sees it differently. He sees them denying John what little dignity he has left: the dignity to die. And their selfishness touches wells of feeling so deep that he says nothing. After his sister Janice demands that the doctors do whatever they can to facilitate a "miracle," J.D. walks out of the hospital. "Just then, that whole group of exhausted, teary-eyed people--my mother, my sisters, his friends--were either part of the sinister forces who had killed my brother or part of the sinister forces who were keeping him alive."

He knows that his anger is misplaced, that his feelings are the raw vestige of years of pain and alienation. But there is no bridge to cross between him and his sisters, and his brother, on the edge of death, can say nothing. John doesn't last long, and finally slips away, and Dolan is left to answer what he can for himself.

Trying to make some sense of John's life, he concludes that his older brother was somehow changed by the war in Vietnam, by a bad marriage and by the passing of years that beat out of him his simple love of the desert. As he says goodbye to his brother, Dolan remembers the joy and adoration. He remembers what was there before the anger. He sinks into that memory, into the feeling of safety he had in his brother's arms, and the book ends.

If that sounds pat in summary, Dolan--his prose minimal, measured, controlled--makes it all acutely moving. He doesn't claim that the answers are complicated. He doesn't even claim that they are correct. But he needs a narrative to come to terms with his brother and his family. He needs words. And for a family where silence was a cruelty, words are hard won.

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times

Publishers Weekly

Dolan's brutally honest, enthralling memoir about his dysfunctional family and the loss of his brother transforms a personal tragedy into a moving meditation on how family relationships shift over time, and how the death of a loved one can become a defining moment in one's life. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s with three feuding sisters, a taciturn older brother whom Dolan worshipped and parents who seemed more interested in their Masonic Lodge activities than in their kids, the author endured a family life of betrayals and punishing silences that lasted for years. By his own account, Dolan in his 20s was a pot-smoking, LSD-popping road manager for rock bands and "famous pop relic" Cher, but gradually straightened out and became a writer whose stories and articles have appeared in Esquire and the Nation. In 1985, when his brother, John, suffered severe burns in a power-plant explosion and lay dying in a Phoenix, Ariz., hospital, Dolan rushed back from Paris, even though John had refused to speak to him for the previous five years. We never fully learn why brooding John was "pissed off at the world," though the reasons seem to lie in his constant need to prove his manhood, his bitter divorce and the emotional armor-plating that was a legacy of his upbringing. Dolan's razor-sharp prose cuts on impact, while his narrative throbs with regret, guilt and unspoken love. This exceptional debut marks Dolan as a writer to watch. Agent, Amanda Urban, ICM. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Growing up in the 1950s on the edge of the desert near Los Angeles, Dolan idolized his brother, John. Eleven years older, John was a like a second and much cooler father--one who taught J.D. to shoot and ride a motorcycle and who told him the truth about even the hard things like the death of his dog. Years later, though, John died after an explosion, having not spoken to J.D. for five years. In a narrative that moves back and forth in time without ever confusing the reader, Dolan unsparingly renders the nuances of the guilt, anger, and grief that he and other family members feel as they keep watch at John's hospital bedside and remember happier times. Dolan's previous work has appeared in Esquire, the Nation, and New Stories from the South. This beautifully written memoir is recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

The New York Times Book Review - Margaret Parker

[A] brave memoir...

Esquire Magazine Editors

Phoenix is astonishing in its clarity and grace; it is a memoir whose profundity lies in its silences.

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

++++

The afternoon before Christmas, John waxed his car out on the driveway, covering it with whorls of pale greenish wax until the car looked like a ghost of itself. John didn't like to do his waxing in bright sunlight--partial shade was always better, he said--but wanted to give the car one last coat before he was drafted; besides, this was only winter sunlight, bright and weak, the kind that looks warm but isn't. As he slowly rubbed away the dried wax with the folded cheesecloth, the red Corvette began to shine like a Christmas tree ornament.

Our ash tree in the front yard had been steadily losing its leaves for the last week, and the dry brown leaves were falling thick as snow on our dry brown lawn--which made for great sliding. I hid behind the variegated ivy that framed the front porch, a good toy soldier in one hand, an evil toy soldier in the other: waiting until just the right time. Then I made a run for the spread of leaves and shrieked like a dive-bomber, and then became the bomb and hit the leaves sliding, and the leaves became smoke--there were screaming and machine-gun fire!--and gradually, you could see the good soldier rising heroically from the rubble. With my sneakers I stubbed the leaves back into place, then skipped across the lawn to the front porch and hid behind the ivy again, good in one hand, evil in the other, and waited.

When our father was due home from work, I sat on the fire hydrant at the corner until I saw his old yellow-and-white De Soto in the distance. Then I crossed the street, and he pulled up and stopped--our daily routine--as I climbed onto the big chrome bumper and held tight to the hood ornament, a bust of the helmeted De Soto himself. With me clinging to the warm hood, my father drove slowly past our yellow tract house, then sped up slightly as he made the U-turn and pulled up in front, swirling leaves, braking evenly until the last few feet, where he stopped the car with a little jolt, and I let go of the hood ornament and, for a moment, could fly.

John watched, grinning, from the driveway.

As my father walked toward the house, I trotted alongside, carrying his old beat-up briefcase and wearing his smart Greyhound cap, which fit my head like a tent.

John nodded hello and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He seemed to be contemplating his wax job.

Dad nodded hello back, then veered over to the driveway beside John. They didn't look at each other, only at the car, and probably at their elongated reflections in the mirrored finish.

"Looks good," Dad said.

This was a tense moment. It had been months since the two of them had said anything more to each other than a grumbled "hello," and usually they didn't even say that much. I didn't understand what all of this was about, just that it had started when Joanne stayed out past her curfew and was ordered by our father to move out. John had been mad about it, and my mother had been nervous, and Janice and June had begun a turf war over the new space this opened up in the big bedroom that until then the three girls had shared pretty happily.

I set the briefcase on the lawn, took off the Greyhound cap.

John wiped a speck of wax from the door handle. "Well," he said, "it'll help protect it."

Dad looked at John and said, "You're not going to leave it out here, are you?" as if his greatest worry about his oldest son getting drafted was that his son's car would be prey to the elements.

John shrugged at this hopeless situation and said, "And the battery will probably go dead," as if his greatest worry about getting drafted was whether his car would start when he got back.

At the time, those were probably my greatest worries, too.

My father shook his head. "No. No. Keep it in the garage. I can start it up once a week. I'll keep an eye on it."

John didn't say anything, but I could tell, from the way his shoulders dropped a little, that he was relieved.

My father picked up the briefcase, took the Greyhound cap from my hands, and said, walking away, "I'll tune it up before you get back."

With John and Dad on seemingly good terms again, the world seemed a wonderful place, a lucky place to be alive for. I went back to playing in the dead leaves and, once exhausted, lay there on my back and stared up at the immense blue sky and the faint high clouds, and as the clouds moved it felt as if the earth was turning. I could see the snowy peak of Mount Baldy, which was usually hidden in smog but now seemed to stand out in high relief on top of the Cannons' house across the street. John kept working on the Corvette, vacuuming the interior, wiping down the dash, polishing the gauges. He'd turned on the radio, and Elvis sang of blue Christmases and Bing sang of white ones. It was getting dark, and one by one our neighbors' Christmas lights came on, then ours did, and in Hollywood, probably at some movie premiere, searchlights fanned bars of light across our sky. I heard something overhead--it sounded as if the sky was humming--and finally I saw it, just another ordinary miracle: the huge silver blimp cruising the San Gabriel Valley in preparation for next week's Rose Parade, its side spelling out the truth in giant spotlighted letters: GOODYEAR.