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Summary
Summary
The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother's childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet, is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive, ex-cop father. When Jon and Ray form a tight friendship, they find in each other everything they lack at home, but it's not until Ray falls in love with beautiful, headstrong Karen Dorsey that the three friends begin to dream of breaking away from Brewster for good. Freedom, however, has its price. As forces beyond their control begin to bear down on them, Jon sets off on the race of his life--a race to redeem his past and save them all.
Mark Slouka's work has been called "relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive" (New York Times Book Review). Reverberating with compassion, heartache, and grace, Brewster is an unforgettable coming-of-age story from one of our most compelling novelists.
Author Notes
Mark Slouka is a graduate of Columbia University and he has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches at Columbia and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This collection from Slouka (Brewster) features variations on the theme of encroaching death in 15 disquieting, sharply compressed short stories. Sometimes that feared death is that of the hero, as in "Dominion," in which a retired journalist is haunted by the cries of coyotes and the animals they kill. Sometimes it is that of an acquaintance, such as the little girl who waited for her school bus-and died in an accident-near the garden grown by the narrator of "Russian Mammoths." Frequently, it is the feared demise of a father or a son: fathers and sons in Slouka's world are enmeshed, trying desperately to protect each other, and sometimes succeeding. Even more often, it is the death or near-death of an animal, like the rabbit the Czech father of one narrator has to kill for food just before his relatives are taken away by the Nazis ("The Hare's Mask"); the giant fish a boy catches on summer vacation ("Justice"); or the beloved pet dog who, in the haunting and surreal "Dog," starts growing razor blades all over its body, so that to pet it is to risk agonizing injury. Even the most seemingly casual of these tales vibrate with danger, and together, they create the sense of a world where unendurable loss is just one misplaced footstep away. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Slouka's third novel, set mainly in 1968 in hardscrabble Brewster, N.Y., is a departure from his last, the dark and lyrical World War II book The Visible World (2007). Jon Mosher is 16, the son of Jewish migrs who were remote and taciturn even before Jon's elder brother died suddenly in childhood. Guilt-stricken and alone, Jon befriends a similarly solitary boy named Ray Cappicciano. Ray, a brawler who often comes to school (or doesn't) in a battered and bloody state from what he says are semipro boxing matches out of town, lives with his father, a violently drunken ex-cop and ex-soldier with a grisly collection of war trophies, and Ray--the analogy to and symmetry with Jon's own situation as a sibling is made much of--bears the responsibility for his baby brother, whom he is able to farm out to relatives in New Jersey for a while. Jon takes up distance events in track as an outlet; both boys fall in love with a smart and beautiful girl named Karen, who opts for the rougher-edged, tougher yet more vulnerable Ray but who remains a close friend and confidante of Jon; Jon achieves success as a runner and meanwhile tries to ignore mounting clues about the nature of his friend's struggles. Against a persuasive backdrop (and soundtrack) of late-1960s America, we see the boys try--with, tragically, only partial success--to plot escape routes. Slouka writes affectingly about small-town life. He's especially good at conveying what it's like to live in a loveless, but not malign, household like Jon's. The book moves at a rapid and accelerating pace, and with ruthless precision, toward a surprising conclusion. But it takes shortcuts, indulging in a kind of sepia hokeyness at times and at others in a darkness that is too schematic and easy, that relies on a villainy that's not quite believable. Flawed, but unmistakably the work of an accomplished writer.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Slouka (The Visible World, 2007) brings a Richard Russo-like compassion and his own powerfully stripped-down prose to this poignant coming-of-age story set in the small blue-collar town of Brewster, New York, in the year 1968. Jon Mosher has always felt like an outsider because of his parents' roots as German-Jewish emigres and the accidental death of his older brother, which has broken his parents' spirit. He channels his anger into running track with his high-school team and eases his isolation through his friendships with the hulking Frank Krapinski, a devout Christian and talented athlete; volatile Ray Cappiciano, who is forever getting banged up in fistfights; and beautiful, forthright Karen Dorsey, who soon starts dating bad-boy Ray. Always looming in the background is the specter of Ray's alcoholic father, a sadistic WWII veteran possessed of a raging temper. What Slouka captures so well here is the burning desire of the four teens to leave their hardscrabble town behind and the restricted circumstances that seem to make tragedy an inevitable outcome. What Slouka also draws, with unerring accuracy, is the primacy of friendship and loyalty among teens who feel they are powerless. Slouka gives them a voice here, one filled with equal parts humor and pain.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FAMILIAR music beats throughout "Brewster," Mark Slouka's intense and elegiac novel about the friendship between two teenage boys during the late 1960s and early '70s. The Beatles and the Stones are on every radio. Every cafeteria conversation finds a way to Muhammad Ali or Charles Manson, Kent State or the draft. But this is not a novel about turning on, tuning in or dropping out. Jon Mosher and Ray Cappicciano don't make it to Woodstock, even though it's just an hour and a half up the road. "Things were changing," Jon tells us, "but we couldn't feel it. The children of God came through in their sandais and ponchos - we'd see them hitching backward up Route 22 with the wind whipping their hair into their faces, adjusting their packs or their guitars - but they kept going." Aside from the counter-cultural trappings of the era, the kids in Brewster live in a world frozen a decade earlier, when boys walked along railroad trestles, a switchblade in one back pocket, a comb in the other. It's not surprising that Mark Slouka, a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a Thoreauvian voice on the dangers of modernization (most recently in "Essays From the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations" and, back in 1995, before most of us had e-mail addresses, "War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality"), has written a powerfully nostalgic novel steeped in innocence and idleness. His other two novels also looked to the past: the days of the original Siamese twins Chang and Eng (in "God's Fool") and the days of the Czech resistance (in "The Visible World"). His collection of stories, "Lost Lake," captures the quiet dramas of three generations on the shores of a lake in upstate New York. In Slouka's third novel, we return to the same region where his stories are set. Lost Lake is just off the map in "Brewster," "curved and still behind the trees," one of many lonely landmarks Jon, the narrator, passes as he walks through the rural streets. For the first 16 years of his life, Jon does his best to blend into the bleak landscape. He works in his father's shoe store. He eats lunch alone. Then two things happen that change his life: his history teacher asks him to join the track team, and he meets Ray. Tough, loudmouthed, scrappy, with messy hair, a long black coat and constant bruises from street fights, Ray is everything Jon isn't: "There's no reason we should have been friends." But, together with Ray's saintly new girlfriend, Karen, and Jon's new teammate Frank, they form an instant alliance. Karen and Frank, like all of Slouka's characters, are lovingly, meticulously wrought. Through Jon's ever-wistful gaze, we feel the buoyancy of their youthfulness, their goodness - sometimes to the degree that they feel mostly present as moral foils to Jon and Ray, whose shadowy home lives have forced them to age beyond their years. This, we discover, is the reason they are friends - and the reason we keep burning through the pages. It's not just Brewster Jon and Ray long to escape; it's their families. The Moshers, Jewish immigrants, fled Germany with their lives barely intact, only to settle in Brewster and lose their firstborn son, Aaron, in a household accident Jon was almost too young to remember. Jon's mother holds vigil in Aaron's eerily preserved bedroom, listening to his childhood records. Silently the Moshers pass on their survivors' guilt to Jon, who grows up in a house as cold as Ray's is combative. Ray's mother left when he was 9. His father, a World War II veteran and ex-cop, spends his drunken nights holding batting practice in the living room, leaving his son to clean up after him and take care of his baby half brother. Mr. Cappicciano has his moments of charity, as when he presents Jon with the sickening war spoils taken from the Nazis he killed. These are parents with deep wounds suffered on another continent, and they hand them over to their children - whose friends are now shipping out to another war - with chilling and heartbreaking cruelty. It's hard to say which violence is more painful to bear, the icy lovelessness of Jon's house or the alcoholic volatility of Ray's. But at least Jon's house is quiet. When things get bad, Ray stays with Jon, whose parents, to Jon's surprise, take to him in a way they've never taken to their own son. Before long Ray is part of the family, the brother Jon never knew: "We'd sit up late, listening to records, then turn off the light and go right on talking - about school, about girls, about life. I'd hear his voice coming out of the dark and I'd drift off and come back and he'd pause," a pause Jon fills by acknowledging how messed up things are, "because that covered pretty much everything." For a while, Jon and Ray go on like this, spinning their wheels, and the book spins its wheels with them. They skip school, take aimless walks and dream of life after Brewster. Little by little, we begin to understand why Jon finds refuge in running, even though he's so unpracticed that his first run makes him ill. Before long he's proved himself and becomes one of the stars of the team, earning the anchor spot on the team relay. Refreshingly, though, this is no typical sports novel, the state championship a chance for our underdog to triumph at last by crushing the competition. For Jon, running is survival. It's a chance to feel whole, visible in his body, while living in a house where he isn't even sure he exists. But as the boys run from their houses and are helplessly drawn to each other, the story darkens, deepens. It accelerates. What began as a small-town still life has become fiercely animated. It's like watching a runner who's been pacing himself begin to make a dash for the finish line, or a relay team pass the baton to the anchor runner. As the '60s pass the baton to the '70s, the novel gains its momentum, its incredible speed. Look at this, we think in awe: he had it in him the whole time. But mostly we don't have any time to think at all, because we're gripping the book for dear life, half hidden under the covers. We're stealing out of bed to make sure the kids are breathing, the doors are locked. But this is of little comfort, because the dangers aren't outside. In "Brewster," the home is the most perilous battlefield there is. Only out in the world, with the friends who form your real family, can you pretend to be safe. Slouka's storytelling is sure and patient, deceptively steady and devastatingly agile. Like Ray, the profoundly lovable hero, "Brewster" is full of secrets, and they are tragic ones: there is no sadder fate than being hated by someone who should love you. Yet the story manages to transcend its hopeless circumstances. All the tender feelings these kids' parents should feel for them are transferred to us. We love them. They are our children, and in loving them, they are saved, and so are we. Its hard to say which is worse, the icy chill of the narrators family or the volatility of his friends. Eleanor Henderson's first novel, "Ten Thousand Saints," was one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2011.
Library Journal Review
The setup is familiar: bright Jewish track star Jon is befriended by long-coat, wrong-side-of-the-tracks loner Ray as they both fall for smart, empathetic beauty Karen, but she loves only one of them (guess which?). What separates Slouka's coming-of-age story from most others are dead-on characters, the small-town setting in downstate New York, and the 1968-71 time frame. Although the characters must struggle to articulate their thoughts and feelings, they succeed despite themselves, and the sensory images (e.g., the smell of burning leaves, the chill of ice fishing) are truly evocative. There are puzzles, often but not always solved; for instance, Ray was believed to be into bare-knuckles-for-pay fighting, but the truth is something altogether different. The consequences for each character are both surprising and inevitable, and the numerous allusions (e.g., John Carlos, Buffalo Springfield, Marcuse, Wilfrid Owen, Let's Make a Deal, Curtis LeMay, Cool Hand Luke, Country Joe and the Fish) will resonate with many readers. In a back-of-book interview, Slouka (God's Fool) likens this novel to "an adult version of...The Outsiders." VERDICT He's not far off. For literary fiction fans who want to exchange a few hours for a valuable look back at the not-all-halcyon Sixties.-Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.