The Silver family, from a distance, seems unremarkable. There are two parents and two children living in a small private home in Queens. The father works; the mother does not. Everything is "normal" for the 1950s. But something in this Doris Day song is off-key.

The mother begins collapsing on the first page, and never stops. Behind the wheel of a car, she chants weakly: "My brain, my brain! My brain, my brain!" while rifling in her purse for pills. The mother becomes the architectural subconscious of the house, dwelling for days in depression in the basement. When she's feeling low, she goes—physically—low. Occasionally she emerges, to furiously clean house and bake strudel, but she always falls back into crisis. Soon the father leaves forever.

Marc Jampole finds a perfect metaphor for the mother's constant resolutions and withdrawals:

Fresh starts were like the avocado seeds she would stick toothpicks into and balance the toothpicks over an old Yahrzeit glass filled to the top with water, so that the enormous smooth oval seed would sit halfway in the liquid, pointed end up. A fresh start that sits in the sunlight on the kitchen window ledge, offering hope for the future. Hope that it would soon sprout thin gray hairs below the waterline, then thicker white roots, then a stalk and a single leaf, then more leaves and eventually a full plant that she planned to cover with dirt in a pot and water until it grew tall enough so that its top branches scraped the ceiling. But her avocado would only grow a little before she got distracted or depressed and forgot to water it.

(A Yahrzeit glass formerly held a candle lit to remember a dead relative, an appropriate vehicle for the recurrently dying avocado pit.)

Usually in a shaky family, one sibling will play the role of Victim and one last becomes the Big Star. Among the Silvers, Leon is the hero: gorgeous, massively intelligent, a gifted athlete. Jules, the older brother, is less smart, less athletic, less attractive. Guess which one achieves the American Dream? For a child from such a family, success can feel like failure, and failure is a perverse form of success.

In an unspoken way this is a book about Jews in America, and the tragic losses they suffered as a culture. Jules and Leon's father discourses endlessly on the laws of thermodynamics. Three thousand years of spiritual philosophy have reached a dead end in three laws of physics.

Living with a chaotic mother who rockets between despair and frenzied housecleaning is, in some ways, a blessing. It's not nourishing, but it's a challenge, like hiking the Appalachian Trail. Jules becomes a master of daily improvisation—a talent he will later use to devise a life beyond his family.

But the path is not smooth for the Brothers Silver. After their mother loses another job in New York, the family moves down to Florida to be close to the helping hand of her younger brother and the boys' uncle, Emil, an insurance salesman in Georgia. The uncle narrates one chapter, in a wacky Deep South dialect sprinkled with Yiddish:

He'd sit behind the shrubbery on the sunny side of the yard, light up a cigarette, and just play music for hours. Even when it got hotter than all get-out, he'd be out there schvitzing and picking notes."

(That's him describing the teenaged Leon.) When their mother continues to deteriorate and is sent to a mental hospital, the boys leave their home in Florida and move in with their father, now in Chicago.

The family collapses but does not dissolve. The kids are never sent into foster care; there's always someone to catch them. For the Brothers Silver, life is a balancing act, but they don't fall off the tightrope.

Into this circus act come the 1960s. Leon discovers LSD, and Jules, though less enamored of drugs, finds himself in San Francisco in 1967. The history of a family is the history of a nation. Each of the hippies in Haight-Ashbury came from a family, probably not a very happy one. Drugs can substitute for a father's affection and a mother's wisdom for about six months, then cynicism sets in.

I desperately wanted to go to Haight-Ashbury in 1967, but I was way too young, and by the time I graduated high school the 60s had died and the Haight was full of heroin. Still, I have nostalgia for a place I never saw. It's encouraging to learn from Jampole that the real San Francisco of that era was just a series of minor hassles (to use a 1960s term) overlaid with a marijuana haze.

The younger brother disappears into the Deep South, living his life as a carpenter and occasional musician, trying to stay "off the grid." After a four year-long "lost weekend" with a woman named El (which, I must point out, is one of the names for God in Hebrew), Jules settles down, marries a sensible woman named May, finds a conventional job, moves to the suburbs, and stops talking like Che Guevara. He finds the "normalcy" that eluded him throughout youth.

My friend Tyler Gore once said: "Everyone in the suburbs is insane, but they're all insane in exactly the same way." That uniformity seems to have done wonders for Jules, who much prefers shared insanity to the lonely self-annihilation of his mother.

There is much psychological wisdom in The Brothers Silver. High intelligence can be a curse. It's isolating, emotionally choking, and paradoxically paralyzing, whereas mediocrity can be a blessing. The non-gifted can always make up some of their intellectual shortfall with sustained effort. Some "gifted" people feel they have too many brain cells, and methodically attempt to eliminate them.

Leon became an "acid casualty": a person who ingested so much LSD that permanent damage ensued. Such men—the ones I knew were all men—usually became silent and affectless, like victims of war trauma, their hold on reality precarious.

And Jules is wrong: Leon was not the favorite. Their mother had a dependent, erotic relationship with the baby brother, which caused Leon to retreat, endlessly, throughout his life. Meanwhile, the father saw the younger boy as an alter ego to compensate for his own failures. Jules was able to "hide" from their exploitative attention, and thus to survive.

A family is a tapestry of guilt—at least a Jewish family. Jules's regret largely concerns his brother and mother. (Towards his dad, Jules feels only an impotent rage.) He could save no one else, only himself.