A book I bought purely off the back of Duffy’s magnificent The World As I Found It (1987), a fictionalized biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I was frankly staggered by the Wittgenstein book, which also demonstrated insight beyond mere research & writing; and so I was inevitably disappointed by Last Comes the Egg.

It’s superficially a typical American MFA program thesis, a 1960s coming-of-age novel following a young boy whose mother dies, he gets in some scrapes with other boys, runs briefly away from home, steals things, learns more about his mother etc. etc. I was reminded of the numerous American short stories I read online, back when I was (vainly) trying to get my own work published: these American tales all seemed to be about a 40-50-something writer who was going through a painful divorce and then remembered going fishing with his grandfather when he was 10, and how it taught him so much about hardship and life, etc etc. It’s not that I dislike the idea; it’s just that I kept coming across the same basic paradigm and after a while sighed glumly when the story went from “Janice broke my graduation cup when she left. As the shards fell, I thought of my grandfather Jake, pulling a knife out of his boot when we were camping in the woods around Missougharie Bay, I was 8 and had never fished before in my life, but boy I was about to learn.” It gave me the weird feeling that Americans all inhabit essentially the same mythic world of 40-50-something divorces and fishing trips with grandpa; as if all Americans are one person, probably called Bill.

The Duffy book is well-written and well-crafted; and though the whole thing is told through the eyes (and tongue) of a child, which necessarily limits its range, it has many fine passages, e.g.

About then, Father Nivas comes thudding up in the black ‘Nivasmobile,’ a smoking police-junker ’53 DeSoto so charred and salt-eaten it looks like a giant meteorite on wheels.

And, amusingly in 2019, there are pre-SJW references to “coloureds” and “niggers” on almost every page, e.g.

Look, I know I probably sound like a total nut, always seeing coloreds everywhere now. But sure enough, as we hit the 4-H with the big white columns and the flags – well, on the lot, under the pink and green paper lanterns, there’s a whole congregation of coloreds parking the cars.

I most enjoyed the young black kid, Sheppy, with whom the protagonist absconds for a few days in a stolen car. Duffy really hits the black speech patterns and behaviour; it’s neither sentimental nor judgemental – it would probably be impossible today, to describe the casual brutality and recklessness of the black community, but then this is a book from 1997.

As with The World As I Found It, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone uninterested in the characters or milieu; perhaps, a reader uninterested in Wittgenstein, Russell, G.E. Moore, pre-WW2 Cambridge, would find World a tedious read. I found Last Comes the Egg enjoyable enough but because I am almost totally uninterested in these coming-of-age tales, and Americana, I merely chugged pleasantly along, admiring the craft and prose, and was glad when it was over and I could go on to other books. I would venture, however, that anyone who grew up in 60s America might find it as gripping as I did The World As I Found It.