about the book
I think I always hated the place, Brewster. I remember it in perpetual winter, brown hills covered in dirty crusts of ice, dark gray skies tearing the smoke sideways from chimneys, houses that smelled like garlic, old people, and baby shit. I can talk about it now. I couldn’t for a long time.
Hating the small crappy dead-end town was one of the things Ray Cappicciano and I had in common. The first time I saw Ray, he was being followed by three furious guys. Instead of running away, he slowed down, turned, bent as if to tie a shoe lace, and then slammed into two of them, sending their battered bodies flying off the dirty snow. Fist’s flashing, he laid into the third. When the fight was done, he just sauntered off. That is what Ray did. He fought…and he fought well.
Though we had absolutely nothing in common, Ray and I became good friends.
My name is Jon Mosher. Back in 1968, I was sixteen and an unpopular school track star; now I am a troubled adult alienated from my German-Jewish émigrés parents and their community. Two more people round out my memories: Frank Krapinski, a devout Christian and a javelin thrower, and saintly Karen Dorsey, a headstrong beauty who dumped me for the edgier Ray.
This is the story of how the four of us formed a rare friendship and made plans to leave Brewster. It is a complicated and painful journey that involves loneliness, abandonment, abuse, and buried secrets. Deep wounds from generations past reveal the childhood death of an older brother and a sadistic ex-cop and WWII vet who collected Nazi body parts.
I tried to redeem myself and save them all…but freedom came with a terrible price.
about the author
Mark Slouka, author, essayist, and a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, grew up in the Brewster area and, after traveling the world, he lives there now. The little town drew him back and he felt compelled to write about it in his novel Brewster.
After his parents, Czech refugees, immigrated to the United States, Mark was born in Queens, New York. He couldn’t even speak English until he was five or six. He was young when they moved to the blue-collar Brewster area, and Mark writes that he wanted to leave immediately.
The character of Jon’s mother in the novel is patterned after Mark’s own mother. Just like Jon, Mark had a wonderful relationship with her until she slipped into a deep depression over a child she lost. From that point on, it was as if Mark didn’t exist. Her grief blocked everything else out.
And like Jon in the book, Mark also runs…to quiet the voices in his mind, to get away from things, and for the pure joy of covering the miles. It wasn’t until the book was published and someone made a comment that Mark realized that he had literalized all those icy moments of his own adolescences.
Even with such a rough childhood, Mark did pretty well for himself. He was a Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient and has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. He has authored six books, fiction and nonfiction, and they have been translated into sixteen languages! His previous novels always dealt with his family’s emotional stories in Europe and first generation immigrant experiences. With Brewster, he finally came home and wrote a truly American tale.
Sources:
Author biography: Amazon
Author interview: Powell’s
Author interview: Medium
Also by Mark Slouka:
The Visible World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2007.
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