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Brewster
Winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award. It's 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old track star Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Stuck in Brewster, he forms a friendship with rebellious Ray Cappicciano and headstrong Karen Dorsey, embarking on a race to redeem his past in this heart-wrenching story of love and friendship.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2013
67 people are currently reading
5150 people want to read
About the author
Mark Slouka
18 books110 followersMark Slouka most recent books are the story collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters, the memoir Nobody’s Son, and the award-winning novel Brewster. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Prague.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 438 reviews
September 10, 2020
Warning: this is a guy’s review for guys. Men aren’t supposed to read novels, but it’s been documented that doing so won’t actually kill us. So sensitive souls take note, this review contains some violence and adult language.
First a question: did you ever read Catcher in the Rye? If so, did you wish you could seriously bust up Holden Caulfield with a baseball bat? What a dumb-assed prick! Recommendation: Brewster is the antidote to that other book. This too is a coming of age story, but minus the character that just pisses you off. This is the one your English teacher should’ve assigned, if it had been written then.
Most of us had some issues coming up in high school. It’s a tough time of life and easy to identify with. Brewster has characters you can connect with, ones you care about and want good things to happen to. This story has an edge too and you know early on that things probably aren’t going to end well. This is not a fairy tale. It has the feel of reality.
Slouka’s writing will make you work a little bit. He likes a turn of phrase so his prose will make you think and consider, but it won’t get in the way of the story. Reading this book is more like running some light hills than shuffling around the corner to buy beer. When you run you sweat and it feels good.
So guys, this is a book you can safely read with the cover showing on your morning commute. Maybe some other guy will see it and you can proudly tell him what you’re reading. If you’re not a guy, but you know one and wish he’d read more than just the sports pages this is an easy call. If he reads Junger and Krakauer this is a really easy call. Just don’t expect him to run off and join a book group. (Rated four stars because five stars are for Huck Finn and Cannery Row.)
First a question: did you ever read Catcher in the Rye? If so, did you wish you could seriously bust up Holden Caulfield with a baseball bat? What a dumb-assed prick! Recommendation: Brewster is the antidote to that other book. This too is a coming of age story, but minus the character that just pisses you off. This is the one your English teacher should’ve assigned, if it had been written then.
Most of us had some issues coming up in high school. It’s a tough time of life and easy to identify with. Brewster has characters you can connect with, ones you care about and want good things to happen to. This story has an edge too and you know early on that things probably aren’t going to end well. This is not a fairy tale. It has the feel of reality.
Slouka’s writing will make you work a little bit. He likes a turn of phrase so his prose will make you think and consider, but it won’t get in the way of the story. Reading this book is more like running some light hills than shuffling around the corner to buy beer. When you run you sweat and it feels good.
So guys, this is a book you can safely read with the cover showing on your morning commute. Maybe some other guy will see it and you can proudly tell him what you’re reading. If you’re not a guy, but you know one and wish he’d read more than just the sports pages this is an easy call. If he reads Junger and Krakauer this is a really easy call. Just don’t expect him to run off and join a book group. (Rated four stars because five stars are for Huck Finn and Cannery Row.)
July 11, 2014
This is an emotionally powerful, beautifully written and devastating story of a deep (but unlikely) friendship between two young men as they attempt to break free from Brewster, a cold and isolating blue- collar town in New York state. The narrator is Jon Mosher, the son of Jewish survivors of a Nazi concentration camp. After a tragic death of his older brother when he was 4, his parents simply shut down…never recovered. He mostly drifts through school until eventually forming an intense bond with Ray Cappicciano, a student on the fringes of high school with a bad boy persona. Ray’s personal life is a gut-wrenching tale with a ruthless, alcoholic ex-cop for a dad. His reputation as a brawler conceals injuries that he receives from this venomous and brutal father.
The two main characters in this story broke my heart. I felt like I was holding my breath at times - my escalating sense of foreboding was so powerful. The writing is remarkable - cryptic at times and beautiful in its austerity. Slouka created an intoxicating sense of place. The setting is the late 60’s, a time period that I remember well. All the references to Vietnam, the music (Woodstock) and the current events brought back memories of those turbulent (but often exciting) years for me.
This is one of my favorite novels for 2014. I haven’t read anything by Mark Slouka but I surely will check out his other books. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
The two main characters in this story broke my heart. I felt like I was holding my breath at times - my escalating sense of foreboding was so powerful. The writing is remarkable - cryptic at times and beautiful in its austerity. Slouka created an intoxicating sense of place. The setting is the late 60’s, a time period that I remember well. All the references to Vietnam, the music (Woodstock) and the current events brought back memories of those turbulent (but often exciting) years for me.
This is one of my favorite novels for 2014. I haven’t read anything by Mark Slouka but I surely will check out his other books. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
November 20, 2013
Late 60's, in a small town called Brewster in New York, three boys and a young girl come of age. Charles Manson was in the news, being drafted for the Vietnam War was a real threat and Woodstock was happening a short distance away, these were circumstances happening outside their homes, but the real threat and the hurt would come from the place they should have been the safest, their own homes.
I was very young during this time period but I remember my best friend's brother being drafted, seeing him in his uniform, leaving for boot camp, wondering if he would have any life left when he returned.. Jon and Ray are such wonderful characters, dealing with the hurts in their families in the only way they knew how. Good boys, troubled boys, boys the reader becomes emotionally involved with, want to save. Heartbreaking and powerful, such a wonderful and poignant book, nostalgic, the tone of the time, perfect. Jon, runs track and that becomes his outlet. Ray, and his family secrets, things he must not tell and a little brother that he loves and to whom he feels responsible. First love and friendship in all its glory and hardship. All seniors wondering how their lives will play out, how the world would change, where they would find themselves in the future.
As they enter the seventies, things will change, the pace of the books speeds up and a horrifying and heartbreaking incident will leave them all reeling, and all their lives will never be the same. As Jon track coach tells him, "You'll be okay, "You can't see it now, but life goes on." That's the thing - it goes on with or without you."
Maybe it's the weather, or that it is getting dark so early and is a bit depressing, but I think this is only the second book that I finished with a lump in my throat and a tissue in my hand., Friendship, pain and memories, the resilience of the human experience.
I was very young during this time period but I remember my best friend's brother being drafted, seeing him in his uniform, leaving for boot camp, wondering if he would have any life left when he returned.. Jon and Ray are such wonderful characters, dealing with the hurts in their families in the only way they knew how. Good boys, troubled boys, boys the reader becomes emotionally involved with, want to save. Heartbreaking and powerful, such a wonderful and poignant book, nostalgic, the tone of the time, perfect. Jon, runs track and that becomes his outlet. Ray, and his family secrets, things he must not tell and a little brother that he loves and to whom he feels responsible. First love and friendship in all its glory and hardship. All seniors wondering how their lives will play out, how the world would change, where they would find themselves in the future.
As they enter the seventies, things will change, the pace of the books speeds up and a horrifying and heartbreaking incident will leave them all reeling, and all their lives will never be the same. As Jon track coach tells him, "You'll be okay, "You can't see it now, but life goes on." That's the thing - it goes on with or without you."
Maybe it's the weather, or that it is getting dark so early and is a bit depressing, but I think this is only the second book that I finished with a lump in my throat and a tissue in my hand., Friendship, pain and memories, the resilience of the human experience.
March 1, 2016
Objective merit 5★
Subjective merit 2★
So difficult to rate a book when it’s so well written yet I did not care for it. There were sentences that went something like: Parents don’t always love their kids—there are no guarantees. That's heartbreak waiting to happen, particularly if those children are despised. This is a boys on the cusp of adulthood story. No cheap shots or extra drama here, excellent writing, 60s-70s nostalgia, and families that define tragic, dysfunctional childhoods with the consequences. It read like a memoir, so well done, and yet I began to grow restless about two thirds of the way in. I don’t believe the author’s talent is lacking, more that I am losing interest in this type of story at this point in my reading life, or at least one that is so gritty and true to life. I feel the need to offer a warning for those that share some of the lines I don’t like to cross. While not gratuitous, there is child and animal abuse. While they are unavoidable facts of life on this planet I prefer to avoid them in my reading material. There is also love woven throughout. An unflinching look into what can shape a life and the relationships that can help sustain it until it can stand or fall on its own terms.
Subjective merit 2★
So difficult to rate a book when it’s so well written yet I did not care for it. There were sentences that went something like: Parents don’t always love their kids—there are no guarantees. That's heartbreak waiting to happen, particularly if those children are despised. This is a boys on the cusp of adulthood story. No cheap shots or extra drama here, excellent writing, 60s-70s nostalgia, and families that define tragic, dysfunctional childhoods with the consequences. It read like a memoir, so well done, and yet I began to grow restless about two thirds of the way in. I don’t believe the author’s talent is lacking, more that I am losing interest in this type of story at this point in my reading life, or at least one that is so gritty and true to life. I feel the need to offer a warning for those that share some of the lines I don’t like to cross. While not gratuitous, there is child and animal abuse. While they are unavoidable facts of life on this planet I prefer to avoid them in my reading material. There is also love woven throughout. An unflinching look into what can shape a life and the relationships that can help sustain it until it can stand or fall on its own terms.
October 10, 2013
If this novel does not win at least one major literary award, then the entire notion of writing prizes is meaningless.
October 17, 2014
4.5 stars
Brewster, New York, circa 1970: a dead-end town a mere reefer-whiff away from Woodstock and the "Summer of Love" (yet worlds apart from the goings-on there) provides the backdrop for this rather stunning not-quite-YA-coming-of-age novel Brewster by Mark Slouka.
It focuses on the unlikely friendship between Jon Mosher, a rather bright, earnest kid living with a family long trapped in stasis mode (thanks to the tragic death of his older brother) who resorts to running with the high school track team to escape the demons in his mind; and Ray Cappicciano, a kid from the "wrong side of the tracks", who is always getting into fights and straddling the line between Brewster High School and Juvie.
This sounds on the surface like Mr. Slouka's travelling down a well-beaten "self-discovery" path, but his electric prose elevates this into something incredible, and haunting, and (perversely) beautiful. From the pitch-perfect dialog to the angst of adolescence during the Vietnam War years, Slouka captures the essence of life in Brewster with woozy precision and resonance. Highly Recommended.
October 27, 2013
If you're over the age of forty, you probably remember a time without cell phones, computers, and politically correct teachers and parents. Perhaps you remember what it was like to be a child without adults hovering above you, waving a complex daily agenda of sports and extracurricular activities that included themselves. In your youth, back in those days, maybe you were relatively free, because your parents were living their own tragic lives and you felt like an outsider. It's a little weird to remember how much we did on our own - riding our bikes everywhere, building forts, making friends and enemies, fighting our own fights, playing with literal fire, navigating the world without thinking there were adults who could help us. It was a simpler time, the 1960s and 70s, but I sometimes forget the cruelty of it, the nasty edge where an adolescent was expected to act like an adult but had no actual power to wield when things went wrong.
Like when your father beats the shit out of you and the police laugh it off.
Like when your mother despises you because you're alive and your brother, her favorite, is dead.
Like when the school you attend does nothing in the face of the bruises and cuts that grace your body.
This is the world of Brewster, New York, in 1968. Slouka's protagonist, Jon Mosher, narrates the story of his childhood and his friendship with Ray Cappiciano, a young man who lives under the thumb of one of those hideous fathers who seem only the creation of fiction, but who, unfortunately, are all too real. It's the story of what happens to both boys.
Mark Slouka's writing has moments of grand beauty. The prose, for the most part, is graceful and straightforward. Occasionally, I got tired of the melodramatic, atmospheric tone of the narrative, but it never got so bad that I didn't want to finish. Every so often there was a line so good that I pencilled it. One example is a description of Jon Mosher's running coach: "Etienne (Ed) Falvo was not a simple guy. First generation out of the Bronx, second out of Aosta, Italy, he was badgering, impatient, generous--hard to resist and hard to take. Everything about him seemed too much--too much curiosity, too much enthusiasm, too much energy--until you realized that you were looking at something like a happy man, a man condemned to love this world the way a father might love his convict son. Helplessly. Knowing better." Now that's a good description!
Despite the unevenness of the story, I liked it better than a 3. Maybe a 4 with a little bit of a minus for the draggy bits.
Like when your father beats the shit out of you and the police laugh it off.
Like when your mother despises you because you're alive and your brother, her favorite, is dead.
Like when the school you attend does nothing in the face of the bruises and cuts that grace your body.
This is the world of Brewster, New York, in 1968. Slouka's protagonist, Jon Mosher, narrates the story of his childhood and his friendship with Ray Cappiciano, a young man who lives under the thumb of one of those hideous fathers who seem only the creation of fiction, but who, unfortunately, are all too real. It's the story of what happens to both boys.
Mark Slouka's writing has moments of grand beauty. The prose, for the most part, is graceful and straightforward. Occasionally, I got tired of the melodramatic, atmospheric tone of the narrative, but it never got so bad that I didn't want to finish. Every so often there was a line so good that I pencilled it. One example is a description of Jon Mosher's running coach: "Etienne (Ed) Falvo was not a simple guy. First generation out of the Bronx, second out of Aosta, Italy, he was badgering, impatient, generous--hard to resist and hard to take. Everything about him seemed too much--too much curiosity, too much enthusiasm, too much energy--until you realized that you were looking at something like a happy man, a man condemned to love this world the way a father might love his convict son. Helplessly. Knowing better." Now that's a good description!
Despite the unevenness of the story, I liked it better than a 3. Maybe a 4 with a little bit of a minus for the draggy bits.
September 19, 2015
This fictional alternately beautiful and brutal coming of age tale narrated by Jon Mosher looking back on his high school days (1968) in Brewster , New York, contains its own soundtrack. With the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, The Rolling Stones, and somewhere in there the Beatles whispering "Let It Be" in the background , Jon, a 16 year old track star and his best friend Ray a darker rebellious type, both of whom will encounter serious setbacks ,try to navigate this tumultuous time as best they can. I am the right demographic for this novel age wise and so appreciated this book which contains a lot of song lyrics that I remember well. Your heart will break for these boys who according to the words of the old John Foggerty tune "ain't no fortunate sons." 4.5 stars
March 13, 2017
Mark Slouka's writing and his vision are nothing but brilliant. I devoured this novel in a a trance. Filled with richness. Slouke reaches deep into the souls of his characters and makes them live.
Moments/Quotes/Conversations...in the story which were favorites:
1) "Das Leben ist nicht einfach. Die Literature, sollte, es auch nicht sein. (German)
Or in English:
"Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either"
2)"Hey, fuck you, I can sit where I want. What're you, the bleachers cops?"
"Yeah, you know about them" McCann said.
"That's right, pencil dick, I would. He took a drag of his cigarette, confident, arrogant. "Tell ya what. I'll polish up your VIP box here with my ass. Leave it nice and shiny for ya."
3) He slept on a mattress on my floor. 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 and I'd say, "Yeah, that's fucked up" because that covered pretty much everything.
4) Its the music that brings it back, brings it alive. Dylan, Creedence, The Beatles, and the Stones. "let me remember things I don't know".
5) "Maybe its's because of everything else, because we could feel things suddenly changing, that we decided to do Halloween that year. Be kids for a night"
NOTE: In my neighborhood: (an old fashion neighborhood) --We get between 100 and 600 hundred kids each year at our door on Halloween night. After reading **Brewster*, I have completely transformed about my thoughts when I see High School kids knock at my door. FABULOUS....I'll give them all the damn candy they want!
This is the first book I've read by Mark Slouke. (an honor, a delight, a treat).
**Brewster** is one of my favorite books I've read all year. It reached deep into my heart! I was at Cal during the Viet Nam War. I grew up with this music --with many of these feelings in the book. I also was blessed to have had a few very close friendships when many of us felt lost/broken when "life-was-a-changin". (we are still friends today)
As for running....Yeah, I did that too!
I have many friends to tell about this book. Its richly unforgettable!
Moments/Quotes/Conversations...in the story which were favorites:
1) "Das Leben ist nicht einfach. Die Literature, sollte, es auch nicht sein. (German)
Or in English:
"Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either"
2)"Hey, fuck you, I can sit where I want. What're you, the bleachers cops?"
"Yeah, you know about them" McCann said.
"That's right, pencil dick, I would. He took a drag of his cigarette, confident, arrogant. "Tell ya what. I'll polish up your VIP box here with my ass. Leave it nice and shiny for ya."
3) He slept on a mattress on my floor. 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 and I'd say, "Yeah, that's fucked up" because that covered pretty much everything.
4) Its the music that brings it back, brings it alive. Dylan, Creedence, The Beatles, and the Stones. "let me remember things I don't know".
5) "Maybe its's because of everything else, because we could feel things suddenly changing, that we decided to do Halloween that year. Be kids for a night"
NOTE: In my neighborhood: (an old fashion neighborhood) --We get between 100 and 600 hundred kids each year at our door on Halloween night. After reading **Brewster*, I have completely transformed about my thoughts when I see High School kids knock at my door. FABULOUS....I'll give them all the damn candy they want!
This is the first book I've read by Mark Slouke. (an honor, a delight, a treat).
**Brewster** is one of my favorite books I've read all year. It reached deep into my heart! I was at Cal during the Viet Nam War. I grew up with this music --with many of these feelings in the book. I also was blessed to have had a few very close friendships when many of us felt lost/broken when "life-was-a-changin". (we are still friends today)
As for running....Yeah, I did that too!
I have many friends to tell about this book. Its richly unforgettable!
January 2, 2014
BREWSTER reads like a melancholy ballad sung by Leonard Cohen, Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. It's like driving down a remote, one-lane dark road surrounding a black reservoir, the starless sky doomy and vast. You are headed toward a forgotten city. Now and then a beacon in the distance blinks like a metronomic eye. Brewster is a static town in upstate New York, where it always feels like winter, "weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys."
It was the end of the sixties, and studious, unpopular Jon Mosher, the narrator, connects with rogue, slanty, Ray Cappicciano, and Frank "Jesus" Krapinski. They were 16 and wanted to get out of Brewster, dreamed of a better life. Jon, whose Jewish parents fled Germany to America, and opened a shoe store in Brewster, survived in a gloomy atmosphere, because his parents never recovered from Jon's brother's premature and tragic death years ago, for which Jon feels responsible.
Ray's father is a racist, truculent ex-cop who drinks all day. Ray was the more mysterious, taciturn, and enigmatic of the three friends. His mother left before he could remember her, and his stepmother left when his baby brother, Gene (barely a toddler now) was born. Ray is devoted to Gene. Frank teaches Sunday school and believes in Jesus as the savior. All carried their parents' burdens, and all vowed to leave Brewster for greener pastures after graduation.
Jon finds a sense of purpose on the track team, and Frank begins to question his faith when his family demonstrates hypocrisy, shunning his sister when she becomes pregnant. Ray hooks up with smart, beautiful Karen Dorsey, and they become a fearsome foursome. Oftentimes, Ray would disappear for days and come back banged up and bruised, from fights he said he competed in in Danbury. As more disappearances occurred, the tale hints at more ominous consequences.
This is a coming of age story, sans sentimentality. It is a tale of loss and the long shadows cast from tragedy and adversity. The tone of the novel is both reflective and melancholy, and the sense of suffocation and imprisonment, and thwarted hopes, swirls like the icy wind of Brewster's winters. There's a feeling of paralysis, and yet, woven within Jon's voice is the promise of a thaw, of a hibernating redemption within an unquiet stillness. This hope buoys the narrative from a relentless pessimism, and also mitigates the pressure cooker of looming menace. I couldn't be sure how it would evolve, the youthful dreams suspended and the freighted sorrow of their lives more dire as the novel progresses.
"There was no going back, though thinking about it, I'm not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there's nothing more stupid than fighting something there isn't--a lack of love, a lack of respect. It's like fighting an empty room...You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there's nobody there--just this feeling that there's something holding you back, that there's a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you're not allowed to go there."
Slouka's prose is assured, meditative, and beautiful. I was a fan after I read THE VISIBLE WORLD, which shared some themes of displacement, the legacy of war, and urgent love. This novel is a sterling tour de force, which left me both shattered and hopeful. If you like literature with depth, emotion, atmosphere, and authenticity, you will be touched by the pathos and humanity of BREWSTER.
It was the end of the sixties, and studious, unpopular Jon Mosher, the narrator, connects with rogue, slanty, Ray Cappicciano, and Frank "Jesus" Krapinski. They were 16 and wanted to get out of Brewster, dreamed of a better life. Jon, whose Jewish parents fled Germany to America, and opened a shoe store in Brewster, survived in a gloomy atmosphere, because his parents never recovered from Jon's brother's premature and tragic death years ago, for which Jon feels responsible.
Ray's father is a racist, truculent ex-cop who drinks all day. Ray was the more mysterious, taciturn, and enigmatic of the three friends. His mother left before he could remember her, and his stepmother left when his baby brother, Gene (barely a toddler now) was born. Ray is devoted to Gene. Frank teaches Sunday school and believes in Jesus as the savior. All carried their parents' burdens, and all vowed to leave Brewster for greener pastures after graduation.
Jon finds a sense of purpose on the track team, and Frank begins to question his faith when his family demonstrates hypocrisy, shunning his sister when she becomes pregnant. Ray hooks up with smart, beautiful Karen Dorsey, and they become a fearsome foursome. Oftentimes, Ray would disappear for days and come back banged up and bruised, from fights he said he competed in in Danbury. As more disappearances occurred, the tale hints at more ominous consequences.
This is a coming of age story, sans sentimentality. It is a tale of loss and the long shadows cast from tragedy and adversity. The tone of the novel is both reflective and melancholy, and the sense of suffocation and imprisonment, and thwarted hopes, swirls like the icy wind of Brewster's winters. There's a feeling of paralysis, and yet, woven within Jon's voice is the promise of a thaw, of a hibernating redemption within an unquiet stillness. This hope buoys the narrative from a relentless pessimism, and also mitigates the pressure cooker of looming menace. I couldn't be sure how it would evolve, the youthful dreams suspended and the freighted sorrow of their lives more dire as the novel progresses.
"There was no going back, though thinking about it, I'm not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there's nothing more stupid than fighting something there isn't--a lack of love, a lack of respect. It's like fighting an empty room...You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there's nobody there--just this feeling that there's something holding you back, that there's a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you're not allowed to go there."
Slouka's prose is assured, meditative, and beautiful. I was a fan after I read THE VISIBLE WORLD, which shared some themes of displacement, the legacy of war, and urgent love. This novel is a sterling tour de force, which left me both shattered and hopeful. If you like literature with depth, emotion, atmosphere, and authenticity, you will be touched by the pathos and humanity of BREWSTER.
December 16, 2013
BREWSTER is both familiar and unique at the same time – a tough feat to pull out. As a coming-of-age story, it falls into that time-honored genre that includes books such as This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Stand by Me by Stephen King…and you can almost hear Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run playing in the background.
It’s hard to bring something new to the time-honored coming-of-age story, particularly one that’s set in the late 1960s, where everything has become almost a tired plot cliché: Vietnam, the assassinations, Woodstock, Boomer nostalgia. But Mark Slouka has done it here. This book broke me and put me together again, touched my heart and made me ache for the characters and for humanity. That’s a tall order for a book.
What’s it about? It takes place in Brewster – a real blue-collar city that’s about an hour away from the glamour and glitz of New York City. Jon Mosher, our narrator, is shunned by his devastated mother after his older brother falls victim to a hapless accident in childhood (shades of Ordinary People.) His best friend, Ray, is a good-hearted bad boy who is raised single-handedly by a violently abusive and alcoholic ex-cop father. Both boys see a gleam of light at the end of the tunnel: Jon, through his talent as a track star and Ray through the transcendent love of a classmate, Karen.
This is a book about outsiders, and Jon quotes Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.” Or are the odds so stacked against you that you can’t win, no matter what? Where do you go when you’re seventeen, when there’s nowhere to go, and when you’re running the only race you’re meant to run…with a goal so elusive it’s hard to ever imagine getting there? The eventual answer has a lot to do with loyalty and finding of self, and when it comes, it packs a wallop that will take the breath out of you. It’s filled with psychological acuity and gritty realism that makes the characters leap off the page.
And it’s beautifully written. AN example: “It was a beautiful September, stunned and perfect, lie the world had been hit on the head: chill mornings, a warm mist over the cold grass, now and then a leaf dropping down like it was being lowered on a string, sparkling in the sun, then going out.” Brewster—a book that’s not afraid to tackle broken lives and broken dreams and the overwhelming urge to survive when life won’t let you – is, as the book jacket suggests, an “unforgettable coming-of-age story.”
It’s hard to bring something new to the time-honored coming-of-age story, particularly one that’s set in the late 1960s, where everything has become almost a tired plot cliché: Vietnam, the assassinations, Woodstock, Boomer nostalgia. But Mark Slouka has done it here. This book broke me and put me together again, touched my heart and made me ache for the characters and for humanity. That’s a tall order for a book.
What’s it about? It takes place in Brewster – a real blue-collar city that’s about an hour away from the glamour and glitz of New York City. Jon Mosher, our narrator, is shunned by his devastated mother after his older brother falls victim to a hapless accident in childhood (shades of Ordinary People.) His best friend, Ray, is a good-hearted bad boy who is raised single-handedly by a violently abusive and alcoholic ex-cop father. Both boys see a gleam of light at the end of the tunnel: Jon, through his talent as a track star and Ray through the transcendent love of a classmate, Karen.
This is a book about outsiders, and Jon quotes Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.” Or are the odds so stacked against you that you can’t win, no matter what? Where do you go when you’re seventeen, when there’s nowhere to go, and when you’re running the only race you’re meant to run…with a goal so elusive it’s hard to ever imagine getting there? The eventual answer has a lot to do with loyalty and finding of self, and when it comes, it packs a wallop that will take the breath out of you. It’s filled with psychological acuity and gritty realism that makes the characters leap off the page.
And it’s beautifully written. AN example: “It was a beautiful September, stunned and perfect, lie the world had been hit on the head: chill mornings, a warm mist over the cold grass, now and then a leaf dropping down like it was being lowered on a string, sparkling in the sun, then going out.” Brewster—a book that’s not afraid to tackle broken lives and broken dreams and the overwhelming urge to survive when life won’t let you – is, as the book jacket suggests, an “unforgettable coming-of-age story.”
January 16, 2014
I'm in a minority, most reviews from the New York Times to the vast majority of Goodreads reviewers loved this coming of age novel set in 1968 upstate New York. I found that his writing style of choppy paragraphs, short chapters and cliche flashbacks to the sixties resulted in an unrealistic and not very compelling plot about superficial characters
The novel is narrated by Jon, a high school student who lives with his two parents who escaped from the Holocaust and lost their other son to a freakish childhood accident causing Jon to grow up in an emotionally empty home. Jon's narrative focuses on 3 friends, Ray, a stereotypical high school "outlaw" who comes from an abusive home(this could be considered a spoiler alert as the physical abuse is not confirmed until late in the novel as part of the climax but the earlier descriptions of injuries were so obvious, and so unrealistic, that I found no literary tension at all. There were two other friends, Frank a track athlete who comes from a fundamentalist family and Karen, who Jon loves but becomes Ray's girlfriend in a Beauty and Beast relationship
There is a subplot, Jon is convinced by a teacher to try out for track and Jon becomes a track star and inspired by his studies enough to eventually get admitted into Columbia. But this believable and attractive storyline culminating with a relay race for the state championship is too much of an afterthought for the novel which spends more time focusing on stereotypical events, blacks are bussed into high school, the daughter of the fundamentalist family gets pregnant and the catholic church tells the family to abandon her, a neighbor girl argues with her dad about Martin Luther King and decides to quit college and go to a commune, after she seduces Jon at a neighboring "hippie" cottage.
Again, my view is a decided minority, but I was disappointed and would not recommend it
The novel is narrated by Jon, a high school student who lives with his two parents who escaped from the Holocaust and lost their other son to a freakish childhood accident causing Jon to grow up in an emotionally empty home. Jon's narrative focuses on 3 friends, Ray, a stereotypical high school "outlaw" who comes from an abusive home(this could be considered a spoiler alert as the physical abuse is not confirmed until late in the novel as part of the climax but the earlier descriptions of injuries were so obvious, and so unrealistic, that I found no literary tension at all. There were two other friends, Frank a track athlete who comes from a fundamentalist family and Karen, who Jon loves but becomes Ray's girlfriend in a Beauty and Beast relationship
There is a subplot, Jon is convinced by a teacher to try out for track and Jon becomes a track star and inspired by his studies enough to eventually get admitted into Columbia. But this believable and attractive storyline culminating with a relay race for the state championship is too much of an afterthought for the novel which spends more time focusing on stereotypical events, blacks are bussed into high school, the daughter of the fundamentalist family gets pregnant and the catholic church tells the family to abandon her, a neighbor girl argues with her dad about Martin Luther King and decides to quit college and go to a commune, after she seduces Jon at a neighboring "hippie" cottage.
Again, my view is a decided minority, but I was disappointed and would not recommend it
January 17, 2015
It’s really hard, I think, to write a book where it feels like almost nothing significant is happening and yet the reader does not want to stop turning to pages.
Mark Slouka’s pulled that off with Brewster, a slow burning book about sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher growing up in late 60s upstate New York. Jon’s parents never got over the death of his brother twelve years earlier, which leaves him feeling very isolated and disconnected. He is recruited for the track team and becomes determined to prove himself. He is also befriended by Ray, whose main motivation in life is to get out of Brewster and away from his violent, alcoholic father.
This book is about a lot of ideas: loyalty, the bonds of friendship, the turbulence of the late 60s, feeling trapped in a place that doesn’t want you. On the surface, Jon and Ray don’t seem like natural friends but they forge a connection because each is burdened with difficult family lives – Jon reflects that he can’t remember a time when his mother loved him because she’s too busy grieving for her first son; Ray gets into street fights to account for the bruises his father leaves behind. As Jon becomes a stronger piece of his track team, he and Ray share the dream of running away from Brewster with their third friend Frank and Ray’s girlfriend Karen.
This book devastated me, and that’s mostly due to the fact that I just wasn’t expecting it to be as powerful as it was. There are times when his narration is full of dread, a foreboding use of foreshadowing and I found myself worried that it might be too heavy-handed, especially because a lot of what was happening on the page itself seemed to be almost mundane. It’s just two teenagers trying to get by as they’re counting down the days.
But don’t let Slouka fool you – he’s gradually driving you into some very powerful territory. This book didn’t just make me cry the way that a love story with an unhappy ending makes me cry. This book left me emotionally raw, wishing that it wasn’t inappropriate to call up my therapist at 11 at night to discuss the feelings that a book had stirred up inside of me.
This is a book that sneaks up on you, then grabs you by the ribs and refuses to let go. I haven’t even figured out how to write about it without sounding like a blubbering idiot, so it’s entirely possible that I’ll scrap this and write a new review in a few days once I can wrap my brain around things again.
Mark Slouka’s pulled that off with Brewster, a slow burning book about sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher growing up in late 60s upstate New York. Jon’s parents never got over the death of his brother twelve years earlier, which leaves him feeling very isolated and disconnected. He is recruited for the track team and becomes determined to prove himself. He is also befriended by Ray, whose main motivation in life is to get out of Brewster and away from his violent, alcoholic father.
This book is about a lot of ideas: loyalty, the bonds of friendship, the turbulence of the late 60s, feeling trapped in a place that doesn’t want you. On the surface, Jon and Ray don’t seem like natural friends but they forge a connection because each is burdened with difficult family lives – Jon reflects that he can’t remember a time when his mother loved him because she’s too busy grieving for her first son; Ray gets into street fights to account for the bruises his father leaves behind. As Jon becomes a stronger piece of his track team, he and Ray share the dream of running away from Brewster with their third friend Frank and Ray’s girlfriend Karen.
This book devastated me, and that’s mostly due to the fact that I just wasn’t expecting it to be as powerful as it was. There are times when his narration is full of dread, a foreboding use of foreshadowing and I found myself worried that it might be too heavy-handed, especially because a lot of what was happening on the page itself seemed to be almost mundane. It’s just two teenagers trying to get by as they’re counting down the days.
But don’t let Slouka fool you – he’s gradually driving you into some very powerful territory. This book didn’t just make me cry the way that a love story with an unhappy ending makes me cry. This book left me emotionally raw, wishing that it wasn’t inappropriate to call up my therapist at 11 at night to discuss the feelings that a book had stirred up inside of me.
This is a book that sneaks up on you, then grabs you by the ribs and refuses to let go. I haven’t even figured out how to write about it without sounding like a blubbering idiot, so it’s entirely possible that I’ll scrap this and write a new review in a few days once I can wrap my brain around things again.
December 7, 2020
I started this book rather lukewarm, but it had come to me highly recommended. . . .as I read, the voice that sits quietly in the reading corner of my brain, but which never resists opining said, 'it kinda reminds me of A Separate Peace. . . ' "Nah," I replied to myself.
About 100 pages in I was no longer lukewarm - this was one of my physical books (thank you, Elyse!!!) and so was a slower read - I approach all books with a real thrill at the tangible-ness of the process of reading: feeling my eyes move, the object in my hands, the pages as I turn them, the words hitting my brain and the scene that springs up in my head - and this book was a full-on movie. Sometimes those are the scariest, when there are dark scenes - and this one has them - and I want to pull away, not see these people I now care about hurt. When the puppies showed up, I knew. We were in for trouble. But I couldn't abandon ship . . . . I was all in even with those high stakes.
When I finished, and quickly turned back and re-read through the last quarter again, bit by bit. And read the very end again. And again. That same hit deep in the gut, in a good way, but with a painful echo. Ya know? In the silence, as I gently closed the book and patted it, like I was letting it know everything would be ok, the voice that sits quietly in the reading corner of my brain, but which never resists opining softly suggested, '. . .A Separate Peace. . . yeah?' "Nah. Maybe a little. yeah" I confirmed, not admitted.
The time this story was set in was My Time, and the author did such a grand job of it. I could hear it, smell it, taste it, and oh could I feel it. He pretty much captured my first love. . . .any book that can shoot you through the heart like that, well. That's what writing's all about, right?
About 100 pages in I was no longer lukewarm - this was one of my physical books (thank you, Elyse!!!) and so was a slower read - I approach all books with a real thrill at the tangible-ness of the process of reading: feeling my eyes move, the object in my hands, the pages as I turn them, the words hitting my brain and the scene that springs up in my head - and this book was a full-on movie. Sometimes those are the scariest, when there are dark scenes - and this one has them - and I want to pull away, not see these people I now care about hurt. When the puppies showed up, I knew. We were in for trouble. But I couldn't abandon ship . . . . I was all in even with those high stakes.
When I finished, and quickly turned back and re-read through the last quarter again, bit by bit. And read the very end again. And again. That same hit deep in the gut, in a good way, but with a painful echo. Ya know? In the silence, as I gently closed the book and patted it, like I was letting it know everything would be ok, the voice that sits quietly in the reading corner of my brain, but which never resists opining softly suggested, '. . .A Separate Peace. . . yeah?' "Nah. Maybe a little. yeah" I confirmed, not admitted.
The time this story was set in was My Time, and the author did such a grand job of it. I could hear it, smell it, taste it, and oh could I feel it. He pretty much captured my first love. . . .any book that can shoot you through the heart like that, well. That's what writing's all about, right?
March 13, 2023
Review to follow
August 14, 2013
I'd rate this 4.5 stars.
Just because the plot of a book seems familiar doesn't necessarily mean it won't be compelling or lack emotional power. In the case of Mark Slouka's wonderful new novel, Brewster, you may have seen similar stories, but even though you may know where the plot will go or how the characters develop, you'll still find yourself completely invested, which is a testament to the power of Slouka's writing.
It's 1968, and the world is on the verge of major change. In the small dead-end town of Brewster, New York, high school student Jon Mosher is ready for the change to come. Raised by parents distant since the death of his older brother when Jon was four years old, he's biding his time until he can leave all of this behind. And when he is convinced by one of his teachers to start running track, he is finally fueled by a motivation other than the urge to flee.
When Jon meets Ray Cappicciano, a rebellious student who also seems as if he is on the outside looking in, the two form a close-knit bond, a brotherhood. Ray, the son of an alcoholic ex-cop father with a violent streak, is a fighter, but he is also surprisingly sensitive, taking care of his young half-brother, Gene, and keeping him out of their father's line of fire. Jon and Ray dream of leaving Brewster, and when Jon, and then Ray, fall for beautiful, intelligent Karen, the trio, along with their friend, Frank, start planning their escape.
"We were like that CSNY song, which didn't make sense but kind of did: '...one person...two alone...three together...four...'—and for a while we were—'each other.' If confusion had its cost—if it was confusion—we didn't know that then."
Obstacles start to stand in the way of their leaving, however. Jon's track career becomes more and more successful, and he pushes himself as hard as he can to help his team win. But he continues to struggle with his relationship with his mother, whom he believes blames him for his brother's death, and for surviving. And Ray's father starts to veer more off course with every day, threatening their plans—and their safety.
Brewster is a book about the loyalty and unshakable bonds of friendship and love, about how sometimes simply having someone believe in you is all you need. It's also a book about how our friends can become our family, and fill the gaps we have in our relationships with those to whom we're related by virtue of blood. As I mentioned at the start of the review, there's not much in this story you haven't seen before, but the sense of nostalgia, of the memories provoked by friendships that develop in high school and childhood, works to the book's definite advantage.
Mark Slouka is a fantastic storyteller. He pulls you into the plot, into the characters' lives and what transpires with them, quickly yet without a modicum of flash, and before you know it you're hooked. Between this and Ron Carlson's Return to Oakpine, which I read prior to this book, I've had the chance to read two terrific books about the strength and the pull of friendship, no matter how far you are from each other, or how many years pass.
Just because the plot of a book seems familiar doesn't necessarily mean it won't be compelling or lack emotional power. In the case of Mark Slouka's wonderful new novel, Brewster, you may have seen similar stories, but even though you may know where the plot will go or how the characters develop, you'll still find yourself completely invested, which is a testament to the power of Slouka's writing.
It's 1968, and the world is on the verge of major change. In the small dead-end town of Brewster, New York, high school student Jon Mosher is ready for the change to come. Raised by parents distant since the death of his older brother when Jon was four years old, he's biding his time until he can leave all of this behind. And when he is convinced by one of his teachers to start running track, he is finally fueled by a motivation other than the urge to flee.
When Jon meets Ray Cappicciano, a rebellious student who also seems as if he is on the outside looking in, the two form a close-knit bond, a brotherhood. Ray, the son of an alcoholic ex-cop father with a violent streak, is a fighter, but he is also surprisingly sensitive, taking care of his young half-brother, Gene, and keeping him out of their father's line of fire. Jon and Ray dream of leaving Brewster, and when Jon, and then Ray, fall for beautiful, intelligent Karen, the trio, along with their friend, Frank, start planning their escape.
"We were like that CSNY song, which didn't make sense but kind of did: '...one person...two alone...three together...four...'—and for a while we were—'each other.' If confusion had its cost—if it was confusion—we didn't know that then."
Obstacles start to stand in the way of their leaving, however. Jon's track career becomes more and more successful, and he pushes himself as hard as he can to help his team win. But he continues to struggle with his relationship with his mother, whom he believes blames him for his brother's death, and for surviving. And Ray's father starts to veer more off course with every day, threatening their plans—and their safety.
Brewster is a book about the loyalty and unshakable bonds of friendship and love, about how sometimes simply having someone believe in you is all you need. It's also a book about how our friends can become our family, and fill the gaps we have in our relationships with those to whom we're related by virtue of blood. As I mentioned at the start of the review, there's not much in this story you haven't seen before, but the sense of nostalgia, of the memories provoked by friendships that develop in high school and childhood, works to the book's definite advantage.
Mark Slouka is a fantastic storyteller. He pulls you into the plot, into the characters' lives and what transpires with them, quickly yet without a modicum of flash, and before you know it you're hooked. Between this and Ron Carlson's Return to Oakpine, which I read prior to this book, I've had the chance to read two terrific books about the strength and the pull of friendship, no matter how far you are from each other, or how many years pass.
January 11, 2013
Oh, my god. Okay, this was absolutely brilliant but a book you should read in the daylight. And in the summer. Reading Brewster in January, in the cold, dark days of winter really put me in Brewster, walking and running (and fighting) right along with Jon, Ray, and Karen. Every cut on my body stung with cold, every deep breath in made me wheeze. Huh. Good writer.
Brewster is the story of 4 friends told by Jon, a boy who's been living with his dead brother hung around his neck for the last 15 years. He's smart, likes poetry, and loves his friends. Ray is his best friend, a boy who is always in a fight, constantly bruised and broken, an outsider outside of this little group of friends. The book is Jon's answer to the question of Why couldn't he see what he could have done? Was there ever anything he could have done?
Kids never appear to see what's below the skin of relationships; it's hard to push for different answers when someone won't tell. What do you do? You love them, let them keep their secrets, let them stay with you when they have to, fight for the things you know you can win or help with. kids, young adults, teens, they don't have any power, the adults can't do anything "to help" without making huge problems for everyone. So what do you do? Wait until something breaks that can never be replaced and be there to paste together what you can.
Ah, I know I'm going to be living with this book for a while. Beautifully written, amazing dialogue, no smooth edges, hard to read (I almost had to read the ending to see if I could handle it), too realistic at times- anyone who's ever worked in schools or with kids knows what can happen.
It was good. Thanks, Dan C., for sending it along.
Brewster is the story of 4 friends told by Jon, a boy who's been living with his dead brother hung around his neck for the last 15 years. He's smart, likes poetry, and loves his friends. Ray is his best friend, a boy who is always in a fight, constantly bruised and broken, an outsider outside of this little group of friends. The book is Jon's answer to the question of Why couldn't he see what he could have done? Was there ever anything he could have done?
Kids never appear to see what's below the skin of relationships; it's hard to push for different answers when someone won't tell. What do you do? You love them, let them keep their secrets, let them stay with you when they have to, fight for the things you know you can win or help with. kids, young adults, teens, they don't have any power, the adults can't do anything "to help" without making huge problems for everyone. So what do you do? Wait until something breaks that can never be replaced and be there to paste together what you can.
Ah, I know I'm going to be living with this book for a while. Beautifully written, amazing dialogue, no smooth edges, hard to read (I almost had to read the ending to see if I could handle it), too realistic at times- anyone who's ever worked in schools or with kids knows what can happen.
It was good. Thanks, Dan C., for sending it along.
June 14, 2016
First things first: This didn't get five stars just because it has a great title (the title didn't hurt!)
This is a poignant and moving tale of life in high school in a small town, about the friendships, dreams, and realities of such a life. Being out of high school for now ten (!) years, it is sometimes easy for me to forget what things were like in those days, or how much influence parents had over what you did and didn't do. This book is an excellent reminder.
I was really surprised how much the book pulled me in, as these kinds of stories don't always resonate with me and sometimes I get bored with them. Here, I got pulled in from the start.
This is a poignant and moving tale of life in high school in a small town, about the friendships, dreams, and realities of such a life. Being out of high school for now ten (!) years, it is sometimes easy for me to forget what things were like in those days, or how much influence parents had over what you did and didn't do. This book is an excellent reminder.
I was really surprised how much the book pulled me in, as these kinds of stories don't always resonate with me and sometimes I get bored with them. Here, I got pulled in from the start.
September 17, 2015
This was a powerfully emotional read. The narrator’s voice created true intimacy with the reader, drawing me into the circle of these young friends so that I could touch their pain, hope, grief, confusion, love. Never did this author need to tell the reader what to think or feel, rather he allowed us to accompany the characters and trusted the story to the reader. This is a coming of age story set in a working class town in the late 1960s, when private pain was hidden, domestic tragedies went unacknowledged and youth were expected to fight adult battles for them. I am so glad to have discovered this gifted writer.
November 12, 2013
Mark Slouka’s new novel is set in the late 1960s, not far from Woodstock, but you can’t feel any heat from the Summer of Love. Although the brooding teenagers in these pages listen to Jefferson Airplane and grouse about the Vietnam War, “Brewster” is about as psychedelic as a bruise. Instead, this is a masterpiece of winter sorrow, a tale of loss delivered in the carefully restrained voice of a man beyond tears.
Slouka, who lives in Brewster, N.Y., the town of the book’s title, is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, where he’s published essays that remind us how vital and incisive that form can still be. Fans of his short fiction and his previous two novels will find here the same quiet wisdom and muted prose that practically mock the pyrotechnics of our hottest novelists.
“Brewster” is a story about a friendship so potent that it’s taken years for the narrator to understand what happened and what it meant. “I can talk about it now,” Jon Mosher says at the opening. He’s looking back at high school in the blue-collar New York town, which made him feel “like somebody twice as strong as you had their hand around your throat.” During those angst-ridden years, Jon says, “My biggest fear was that I’d . . . suffocate inside my own skin.”
That sense of entrapment will resonate with anyone who’s survived adolescence, but Jon’s family has suffered a singular tragedy that casts a shadow on their home: When Jon was 4, his older brother electrocuted himself while playing with a lamp. His parents, who assumed they’d left such horrors behind when they escaped the Nazis, never recovered. “They just broke,” Jon says. “People break, just like anything else. They’d lost everything once, now they’d lost it again.” He grew up without much memory of his dead brother — no one ever speaks of him — but his mother still moves around in a catatonic state, shrieking into action only when Jon dares to disturb one of his brother’s carefully preserved trinkets. Theirs is not so much a home as a kind of living crypt, which Jon can’t wait to escape but is too dutiful to abandon. “Sometimes it felt like there’d been some kind of mistake,” he says, “like I was the one who’d died and nobody wanted to admit it. Mostly I didn’t know what to do.”
Slouka portrays that fetid house in all its enervating effects, but he’s just as powerful when framing the unlikely friendship that redefines Jon’s life. Ray Cappicciano is the school’s bad boy — tall, unwashed, often suspended. Some of the teachers hate him. Some fear him. He gets in fights, sometimes for money. “With his long coat and his dancing brawler’s walk and his black hair which he was always raking back with his fingers, he drew people like something dangerous, unstable,” Jon says. Behind that swagger, though, Slouka unveils the grubby truth of a poor teenager in a dead-end town: The son of an alcoholic ex-cop with a history of domestic abuse, Ray can barely stay in school while trying to defend himself and protect his baby brother.
By his demeanor, his grades, his schedule, his family, Ray seems to have nothing in common with studious Jon, but this is one of those rare high school friendships that are felt with an intensity all out of proportion to the logic of circumstances. “In Brewster there was no other side of the tracks,” Jon notes, but “if there was, Ray would have lived there.” And if, for a moment, we can put aside our reductionist insistence on sexualizing all relationships, this is a story of love. Snared in families damaged in very different ways, these two young men see something pure and admirable in each other: a determination to run a race neither of them can win.
Slouka puts flesh on that metaphor through much of the novel by describing Jon’s involvement with the track team. When the coach insists he join the team, Jon overcomes his nerdy reluctance and begins training with the other guys, even though the only thing more painful than the side stitches is the humiliation. Soon, he’s improving, learning the rhythm of the road and breaking through limits he thought far beyond him. That sounds, I know, like the starting gun of a race toward a sentimental finish, but Slouka never jogs around that well-worn plot; these pages never shift into a scene of slow-motion victory with Mom and Dad — finally — cheering in the stands. Instead, Slouka concentrates on the way running allows Jon to focus his mind on the elemental properties of physical pain and measurable time; to rise above, for a while at least, the subterranean anguish that would swallow him at home.
Slouka has developed an elliptical storytelling technique that might tempt you to imagine that, despite the elegance of these sentences, nothing much is happening in his novel — just sullen teens getting in scrapes and counting down the days. But that would be a misimpression that too many distracted parents and unsympathetic teachers make about such kids. Beneath the shrugs and oblique responses, their lives are riven by impossible choices, spiritual crises and — it eventually becomes clear — acts of unspeakable cruelty. Slouka’s real triumph here is capturing the amber of grief, the way love and time have crystallized these memories into something just as gorgeous as it is devastating.
Slouka, who lives in Brewster, N.Y., the town of the book’s title, is a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, where he’s published essays that remind us how vital and incisive that form can still be. Fans of his short fiction and his previous two novels will find here the same quiet wisdom and muted prose that practically mock the pyrotechnics of our hottest novelists.
“Brewster” is a story about a friendship so potent that it’s taken years for the narrator to understand what happened and what it meant. “I can talk about it now,” Jon Mosher says at the opening. He’s looking back at high school in the blue-collar New York town, which made him feel “like somebody twice as strong as you had their hand around your throat.” During those angst-ridden years, Jon says, “My biggest fear was that I’d . . . suffocate inside my own skin.”
That sense of entrapment will resonate with anyone who’s survived adolescence, but Jon’s family has suffered a singular tragedy that casts a shadow on their home: When Jon was 4, his older brother electrocuted himself while playing with a lamp. His parents, who assumed they’d left such horrors behind when they escaped the Nazis, never recovered. “They just broke,” Jon says. “People break, just like anything else. They’d lost everything once, now they’d lost it again.” He grew up without much memory of his dead brother — no one ever speaks of him — but his mother still moves around in a catatonic state, shrieking into action only when Jon dares to disturb one of his brother’s carefully preserved trinkets. Theirs is not so much a home as a kind of living crypt, which Jon can’t wait to escape but is too dutiful to abandon. “Sometimes it felt like there’d been some kind of mistake,” he says, “like I was the one who’d died and nobody wanted to admit it. Mostly I didn’t know what to do.”
Slouka portrays that fetid house in all its enervating effects, but he’s just as powerful when framing the unlikely friendship that redefines Jon’s life. Ray Cappicciano is the school’s bad boy — tall, unwashed, often suspended. Some of the teachers hate him. Some fear him. He gets in fights, sometimes for money. “With his long coat and his dancing brawler’s walk and his black hair which he was always raking back with his fingers, he drew people like something dangerous, unstable,” Jon says. Behind that swagger, though, Slouka unveils the grubby truth of a poor teenager in a dead-end town: The son of an alcoholic ex-cop with a history of domestic abuse, Ray can barely stay in school while trying to defend himself and protect his baby brother.
By his demeanor, his grades, his schedule, his family, Ray seems to have nothing in common with studious Jon, but this is one of those rare high school friendships that are felt with an intensity all out of proportion to the logic of circumstances. “In Brewster there was no other side of the tracks,” Jon notes, but “if there was, Ray would have lived there.” And if, for a moment, we can put aside our reductionist insistence on sexualizing all relationships, this is a story of love. Snared in families damaged in very different ways, these two young men see something pure and admirable in each other: a determination to run a race neither of them can win.
Slouka puts flesh on that metaphor through much of the novel by describing Jon’s involvement with the track team. When the coach insists he join the team, Jon overcomes his nerdy reluctance and begins training with the other guys, even though the only thing more painful than the side stitches is the humiliation. Soon, he’s improving, learning the rhythm of the road and breaking through limits he thought far beyond him. That sounds, I know, like the starting gun of a race toward a sentimental finish, but Slouka never jogs around that well-worn plot; these pages never shift into a scene of slow-motion victory with Mom and Dad — finally — cheering in the stands. Instead, Slouka concentrates on the way running allows Jon to focus his mind on the elemental properties of physical pain and measurable time; to rise above, for a while at least, the subterranean anguish that would swallow him at home.
Slouka has developed an elliptical storytelling technique that might tempt you to imagine that, despite the elegance of these sentences, nothing much is happening in his novel — just sullen teens getting in scrapes and counting down the days. But that would be a misimpression that too many distracted parents and unsympathetic teachers make about such kids. Beneath the shrugs and oblique responses, their lives are riven by impossible choices, spiritual crises and — it eventually becomes clear — acts of unspeakable cruelty. Slouka’s real triumph here is capturing the amber of grief, the way love and time have crystallized these memories into something just as gorgeous as it is devastating.
July 29, 2016
The scenes are short and the 1st-person voice is kind-of streamy and hard to understand sometimes.
Some of the descriptions were good, but mostly the scenes were flimsy and the pace drove me crazy. The issue of child abuse was depressing.
He was right, life wasn't simple. Parts of it were--a frog scratching its head like a dog, the clean, heavy weight of a bolt in your hand, certain songs--and you'd try to hold on to these but you couldn't hold on for long. Things would get complicated, and the more you thought about them, the more complicated they got.
It's hard to explain about her. It's like trying to describe the smell of fresh-cut grass on those evenings in June when everything stands out from everything else, when the shadows moving up the trees are as sharp as the leaves that made them. You can compare it to something else, you can break it down into parts and hope they add up, but really it's about how it makes you feel.
Some of the descriptions were good, but mostly the scenes were flimsy and the pace drove me crazy. The issue of child abuse was depressing.
August 14, 2013
"Brewster" is a masterpiece of winter sorrow, a tale of loss delivered in the carefully restrained voice of a man beyond tears. Readers will find quiet wisdom and muted prose that practically mock the pyrotechnics of our hottest novelists.
Read our review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
Read our review:
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October 17, 2018
If you need to feel better about your life circumstances, then read this book and you will instantly be grateful you don't live in Brewster with these guys. The writing style is a bit disjointed and the theme of domestic abuse and emotional neglect is tough to read. At first, Ray's tough-guy persona turned me off but as the novel progresses you come to understand why Ray has to put emotional walls around himself and by the end of the novel I felt so much compassion and sympathy for him. Jon, likewise, has to deal with some heavy stuff and the boys bond over their shared familial dysfunction. This one will stay with me for a little while but, unfortunately, so will all the F-bombs. Profanity warning.
December 21, 2025
This book was recommended to me as a running book, and while the running sequences are fantastic-from describing a runner's first attempts at a mile to some blisteringly close relays at The Armory-this isn't really a running book, but more of a bleak, atmospheric coming-of-age novel of the late 60s in upstate New York. The narrator says he remembers his childhood as perpetual winter, and that's certainly how it comes across in the book.
As well as the running, the final eighty pages of the novel is compelling, and genuinely propulsive, just as the beginning is effective in scene-setting, detailing the narrator's loveless relationship with his mother, the death of his older, preferred brother (described in very vague terms). But I found the middle of the book to be very meandering, filled with name-dropping of authors (Camus, Kafka) and very 60s-ish encounters with hippies. Overall, I didn't quite feel that there was character development, more beautiful writing and "set pieces" if that makes any sense. It's a readable book, but it's very "literary fiction" in tone. A solid 4* read.
As well as the running, the final eighty pages of the novel is compelling, and genuinely propulsive, just as the beginning is effective in scene-setting, detailing the narrator's loveless relationship with his mother, the death of his older, preferred brother (described in very vague terms). But I found the middle of the book to be very meandering, filled with name-dropping of authors (Camus, Kafka) and very 60s-ish encounters with hippies. Overall, I didn't quite feel that there was character development, more beautiful writing and "set pieces" if that makes any sense. It's a readable book, but it's very "literary fiction" in tone. A solid 4* read.
November 6, 2021
Ok, I don't know who picks the book awards short lists but both Mark Slouka and Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena) got robbed this year!
Brewster is one of those books you finish reading and slump back dejectedly in your chair and let the air whoosh out in a big sad sigh because its so beautiful and its over and there's nothing left to read.
This is the only book by Mark Slouka I've read so far, and for me, it was as if one crossed the darkside of Gillian Flynn with the poet prose of David Wroblewski, threw in a dollop of Cormac McCarthy's austerity and then added a one-two punch of Steinbeck and Shakespeare.
I believe this story is destined to be a classic. Essentially its a story of a tight-knit group of friends as they wrap up their last months of being young adults, yet its not a coming of age story or a young adult piece of fiction. This is a story of how life happens and in an instant changes the trajectory you were on and affects the rest of your life in such a way you are no more able to part with it than you would an eye or a leg or a lung.
Set in 1968 and fostered by all the life-changing events of the sixties, the story revolves around it's narrator, Jon Mosher who at sixteen is finding himself and trying to find a way out of a house ruled by tragedy - the death of his older brother when Jon was too young to even remember. A loner, Jon finds a rare and consuming friendship with the rebellious Ray Cappicciano, a lovable, troubled tough guy who has more than his own share of hardships living at home with a drunken father. Two other characters attach to this small nucleus, Karen and Frank, but the story really revolves around Jon and Ray and gradually lets the reader in on the power of their friendship.
The writing is remarkable, gorgeous in its simplicity and page-turning in the author's ability to create tension in everyday life.
This goes on the list of books I'll be buying for all my friends on birthdays or Christmas.
Read it and weep.
Brewster is one of those books you finish reading and slump back dejectedly in your chair and let the air whoosh out in a big sad sigh because its so beautiful and its over and there's nothing left to read.
This is the only book by Mark Slouka I've read so far, and for me, it was as if one crossed the darkside of Gillian Flynn with the poet prose of David Wroblewski, threw in a dollop of Cormac McCarthy's austerity and then added a one-two punch of Steinbeck and Shakespeare.
I believe this story is destined to be a classic. Essentially its a story of a tight-knit group of friends as they wrap up their last months of being young adults, yet its not a coming of age story or a young adult piece of fiction. This is a story of how life happens and in an instant changes the trajectory you were on and affects the rest of your life in such a way you are no more able to part with it than you would an eye or a leg or a lung.
Set in 1968 and fostered by all the life-changing events of the sixties, the story revolves around it's narrator, Jon Mosher who at sixteen is finding himself and trying to find a way out of a house ruled by tragedy - the death of his older brother when Jon was too young to even remember. A loner, Jon finds a rare and consuming friendship with the rebellious Ray Cappicciano, a lovable, troubled tough guy who has more than his own share of hardships living at home with a drunken father. Two other characters attach to this small nucleus, Karen and Frank, but the story really revolves around Jon and Ray and gradually lets the reader in on the power of their friendship.
The writing is remarkable, gorgeous in its simplicity and page-turning in the author's ability to create tension in everyday life.
This goes on the list of books I'll be buying for all my friends on birthdays or Christmas.
Read it and weep.
September 28, 2013
I have to say, I almost didn't give this book five stars because there are a couple of events in this novel, and I will not mention them here, that were devastating, memorable that I wish I could forget but know that I never will.
That said, this is a remarkable book, a beautifully written work that I will be thinking about for a long time.
The writing alone is enough to read it. The dialogue is so well written, it could be an exercise for MFA students in how to.
I won't kid you, though. This is a really difficult story, and one that is going to have you putting the book down in you lap because you need to pull yourself back together. Read it.
That said, this is a remarkable book, a beautifully written work that I will be thinking about for a long time.
The writing alone is enough to read it. The dialogue is so well written, it could be an exercise for MFA students in how to.
I won't kid you, though. This is a really difficult story, and one that is going to have you putting the book down in you lap because you need to pull yourself back together. Read it.
June 20, 2016
I'll do a longer review once I've finished my exams. For now I'll just say that out of the hundreds of coming-of-age and Bildungsromanen I've read, 'Brewster' is one of the best. Beautifully written and a heart wrenching gut punch of a novel
December 5, 2013
This is a beautifully written book. Every sentence flowed effortlessly into the next and the character development was superb. Simply a fantastic read. Loved it.
May 15, 2014
Picked this up from the library on the off-chance of something good and was well rewarded. An excellent tale and a thoroughly good read. Highly recommended.
September 22, 2013
6-star. That's pretty much all that my brain is able to say right now.
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