A comic novel by the critically acclaimed author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Doug and 98 of his 99 brothers (George has run off with embezzled funds and a girl named Jane) gather in the huge family library for dinner, drinking, and some late-night football. Throughout the evening, the chaos grows into a complex web of conflicting memories, hurt feelings, rivalries, alliances, and shared awareness. 208 pp. Author tour. National publicity. Print ads. 20,000 print. There are, as the title says, one hundred brothers in Donald Antrim's novel. This sprawling fraternity has gathered in the family library for a dinner and over the course of a few hours, the author serves up sibling rivalry, revelry, and mayhem in meticulous, unflappable style. For the most part, The Hundred Brothers skates along on the strength of its comic ingenuity. Yet Antrim has some serious points to make about masculine pride, vanity, and terror--not by invoking them directly, but by inflating them to monstrous (and mirthful) proportions. And the narrator's comments about his rampaging kin often have a larger, melancholic resonance to them. Indeed, when he points out "the complexities of our interdependence and the sorry indignities that pass as currency between us in lieu of gentler tender," he might be talking about any family--even one in the single-digit range. In this unconventional novel, 99 of 100 brothers meet in the decaying library of their deceased father's estate to locate and bury the old man's ashes. The brothers range in age from 25 to 93, and their idiosyncracies vary even more widely. Doug, the narrator and family genealogist, navigates the winding road of relations, as well as the labyrinthine stacks of the huge library, the organization of which would send Dewey spinning in his casket. Antrim (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, LJ 9/15/93) crafts a comic nightmare of a family reunion, in which old hostilities renew themselves, cliques form and disintegrate with lightning speed, and the lines for the bar and buffet are so alarmingly long it's difficult to get a drink, let alone dinner. The search for the missing urn functions as a device to showcase Doug's delusions of his father's ghost, his (well-founded) fears about his character and worth, and his desire to share with his brothers the true meaning of dread?a favor they happily return. Recommended.?Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. If the very thought of a family gathering causes a sensation of dread in one's solar plexus, Antrim's outrageous new novel featuring a wickedly absurd covey of 100 brothers threatens to bring on an attack of apoplexy. The assemblage of relations who come together here for a bizarre social evening range in age from members of Generation X to a senior citizen of 90-plus years. Individual foibles and the maddeningly arcane conversations taking place between the 98 brothers present are chronicled by a narrator who manages to lure the reader into pursuing the insane deeds of this radically peculiar group. Prepare for a wild ride as you assume your position as a fly on the wall of a red library room, with leaking ceiling and disintegrating walls; the scene is definitely not for the faint of heart. Alice Joyce Surrealism is alive and well in the antic universe of Antrim's fiction. This second novel of a projected trilogy (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, 1993) begins with an audaciously absurd conceit and rings an impressive number of changes on it. Doug, the frantic narrator, gathers with 98 of his 99 brothers (including Zachary, ``the Giant''; Pierce, the ``designer of radically unbuildable buildings''; Milton, ``the channeler of spirits who speak across time''; and the celebrated ``perfect'' brother, Benedict, famous for his work on the ``sexual language'' of social insects) in their deceased father's library to ``put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn'' of their progenitor's ashes. The youngest son is in his mid-20s, the oldest in his 90s. Only George, the urban planner, is missing, having recently vanished ``with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds.'' George is only one of the topics of conversation as the brothers, waiting impatiently for dinner to be announced, inevitably reanimate old grievances and competing loyalties. Doug, a rebel and openly disdainful of their father, inspires a series of bitter clashes among family factions. There are accidents as the brothers, packed into the library, begin to grow restive. Finally, also inevitably, violence breaks out, and the hapless Doug is at the heart of the increasingly violent (if slapstick) family feud. The plot, of course, is secondary here: What matters is Antrim's ability to keep an impossible concept spinning, to come up with more and more outrageous variations, and he does exactly this in a wonderfully calm and