Excess A novelist takes time out from fiction to study the sad mess his brother left behind. Houghton Mifflin Company.
Reasons are recipes for making sense of the world's arrangements and accidents. . . .
Such a time came for Vernon when his older brother, Paul, died suddenly in late February of 1996, leaving the author to inherit his estate. Walking in this hallway was pretty difficult. A Book of Reasons'' is unusual in that Vernon, a historical novelist, turns to science and history rather than intimate memory to examine his brother's life. Vernon lets us ride his mind as it nears the edge of horror and pathos, dips briefly into reminiscence, then ricochets into the emotional neutrality of recitation, tracing long sequences of facts that relate, tangentially, to Paul Vernon and to one another. This approach provides a sort of mechanist's causal chain for Paul's life and death.