An Unenviable Fork In the Road

Reading Nick McDonell's The Third Brother and actually enjoying it a lot more than I expected to. I haven't figured out quite what I think about it yet--the only word that comes to mind is "draining," and that can be good and bad. For all I know by the end of this I might agree with En-dasher.

One thing has jumped out at me so far, on page 197:

Mike's father carried a silver flask and Mike grew up thinking it was not an outlandish thing to do... Lyle, oddly, had the flask on him when he ran out of the burning house. It traveled to Pine Hill as his sole personal effect. Mike was surprised when Lyle took it out of the bedside table in the hospital.

[...]

"This is half full," said Mike, opening the flask. "Have you been drinking this stuff?" he said, smelling it.

"Yeah. It was full when he gave it to me. No one emptied it..."

The line that sticks out is "This is half full." Why? Because in order to write it McDonnell had to make a certain choice, and that is a very funny choice to have to make.

If it had been me, I would have just rephrased it and tried to forget the decision had ever confronted me.