Last Comes the Egg

David R. Godine reissues Bruce Duffy's Last Comes the Egg, the 1997 follow-up to his highly praised debut, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of Wittgenstein. Protagonist Frank Dougherty reminisces about his 1960s suburban boyhood, including the death of his mother, his father's subsequent grief, and a rather dramatic act of rebellion: the theft of a car by Frank and his friends, Alvy and Sheppy. In dense, vibrant, idiomatic prose, Duffy confronts the issues of race, loss and coming of age with a Mark Twain humanism, although he is less na vely nostalgic about the lives and minds of teenaged boys.