The Brothers Keene
The disciples Peter and John were opposites. My favorite example of this is from John 21:4. After an unsuccessful night of fishing near the Sea of Galilee, Jesus appears on the shore. Peter jumps out of the boat to swim out and meet him. It’s said that John noticed him first; he just didn’t leave the boat. This was their dynamic: Peter, a natural leader lacking patience, who seemed to always speak before thinking; and John, steady and thoughtful, the one who looked before he leaped.
If this sounds like too much Bible talk, that’s because I couldn’t help but think of these disciples while reading Devin Kelly’s first novel, Pilgrims (Great Place Books, 2025).
Pilgrims is about a pilgrimage. Bobby Keene—or Brother Keene, as we come to know him, due to the time he spends in an Upstate New York monastery—is searching for his actual brother, Billy, who has run away from home during a cross-country race. Back home, their father grieves Billy’s absence. Their mother, who left the family when Billy and Bobby were still young, haunts the three Keene men. She left without much closure, so the brothers have only vague memories alongside the desire to understand who she truly was, as well as themselves.
Both the Keene brothers are seekers. Billy wants nothing more than to run forever, following the simple rhythm of his feet wherever they may take him. Bobby, not so different from John the Apostle, is very much his counterpart: He contemplates, hesitates, wants to be absolutely sure of every decision he is making. It’s not until Billy runs away that Bobby decides to act. The word brother is crucial here, too—what it means both in the abstract and the literal sense. Found family is a recurring theme for Bobby and Billy as they meet new companions in their searches.
The novel is told from four perspectives: Bobby’s, Billy’s, and each parent’s. Bobby’s is the connective tissue of the novel, and most of the action takes place during his road trip, through the characters he meets. Billy’s perspective is told in brief cutaways of psychological insight, with only occasional scenes from his own misadventures on the run. Found letters from the mother make up most of her sections; some were written to the father, some to Bobby. Kelly creates a candid maternal figure that feels full of emotional authenticity on the page. The father’s sections—lists of compressed lines called “A Father’s List of Things”—read like found poetry.
Kelly never overlaps the brothers’ individual paths, despite Bobby’s pursuit being central. The structure of Pilgrims instead makes it so the brothers encounter someone else who reveals a truth or spouts a spiritual maxim that forces them to reflect. Epiphanies happen often, sometimes many epiphanies in a single exchange of dialogue. (It can start to feel unbelievable at times, given the sheer excess of epiphanies.)
Early in the novel, Bobby spends his time at the monastery observing the moon at night and baking fresh heaps of biscotti during the day. Baking happens to be a favorite pastime at this particular monastery. Bobby’s brothers in Christ drop nuggets of wisdom while working in the kitchen, which serves as the nucleus of the monastery, the place where Bobby gives himself over to the mundane work. He feels something close to purpose in the repetition of baking, deciding to “wake up every day to stack the biscotti.”
He wants to find his brother, but a specific purpose is really the thing he’s after. He tries to formulate a ten-year plan after a former classmate says that “life is a network” and that Billy had better start mapping his out. He has no such plan. The monastery seems to be his anchor, the one place where he can find meaning, even though this doesn’t last.
The roads that the Keene brothers travel are vividly described, and populated with oddball characters that fill most American road novels, a genre full of vagabonds. Pilgrims feels like it sits somewhere in that lineage, updated for contemporary life. There is one central pilgrimage here—a man searching for his brother—but really there are an abundance of them, with each character Bobby meets being on their own path to self-discovery.
Take Patti, a woman Bobby meets at a dog race; she frequents the racetrack to save the discarded dogs, and she lives alone with a house full of her rescues. Later in the novel, Bobby meets a man named Evan who has “been rolling himself across the country in search of alternatives to capitalism.” He hasn’t found that alternative. The stubborn will to find it anyway is why Evan (and by that logic, Patti) continues searching. Evan has his share of philosophical notions about why we search, which he shares with Bobby:
Our world, he said, wants us to stay on the fucking road, because anyone who has any power knows that’s where they can keep us! To keep us as lost souls! Herding! Toward! Some proclaimed! Good! When they keep us there, we lose our power! We can’t do anything. We tell ourselves to love the in-between. We meditate to keep our anxious minds at bay. We don’t have to do that! We can find a here right here. We don’t have to always be going there.
On Billy’s side of the narrative, it was nice to meet the group of misfits he falls in with. Their real names are never given, but instead we get some nicknames: Whaleman, High Five, Doctor. Whaleman loves to relay facts about whales. Doctor was studying to become a doctor before his wandering days, although it’s never clear why he made the switch. High Five loves to give high fives. Billy gets a nickname of his own, Wondering. He questions the observations and personalities of his new cohort in their interactions just as much as he questions himself.
We aren’t given closure about where Billy and Bobby’s paths eventually lead them, and that very ambiguity is an impressive achievement by Kelly. It’s not clear if Bobby will see his brother again, which didn’t bother me as much as I initially thought it would. This is a testament to Kelly’s sleight of hand, taking even the most dramatic stakes, like a lost sibling, and turning the story’s focus inward, to the sense of closure that Billy and Bobby give themselves despite, or maybe because of, their best efforts at living authentically. A lack of authentic living, as trite as it sounds, seems to be what’s troubling both of them.
David Dufour is a writer from Louisiana. He co-hosts Patio, a monthly reading series.
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