New York Times by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2013-08-18T15:34:41.305000+00:00

That First Bromance

‘Brewster,’ by Mark Slouka

By ELEANOR HENDERSON

Published: August 9, 2013

A 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 sandals 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 countercultural 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.

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