Brewster

Stories with an atmosphere of gothic horror are usually set in the rural South, not in familiar places like Putnam county, New York.  Brewster, by Mark Slouka, is an exception.

Slouka's Brewster, N.Y., is a working class town existing -- physically only, not socially or economically -- between New York City and Westchester county to the south and Woodstock to the north. The story is set in the late 1960s.   Bands of Woodstock-bound "hippies" hitchhike their way past Brewster on their way north.  The town and its residents are touched neither by the sophistication of the nearby big city, nor by the times in which they live.  They are people still dwelling in the 1940s, living in a cold, incurious world with narrow horizons.

Stop, children, what's that sound?  Even if we'd stopped, we wouldn't have heard a thing.

This frigid -- both physically and emotionally -- environment is the setting for Jon's story, the story of two high school students growing up in Brewster, and of their doomed friendship.  The narrator, Jon, is the son of Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps.  Jon's older brother had died in an accident when Jon was four, a second calamity in his parents' life that had left them cold and detached.  Jon and his parents go through the motions of living together, walking about the house like unseeing ghosts.

Jon tells his story in terse, self-deprecating sentences.  He says that he does "all right" at school, but  he eventually is accepted at Columbia University.  He's not a "jock," but during the course of the book he is essentially drafted onto his school's track team, where he becomes an outstanding relay runner.

A loner, Jon drifts into an intensely close friendship with Ray, an odd, caustic guy who wanders about the school in a dark coat.  Ray is a fighter, a brawler, really.  He's neither jock nor scholar.  He exists on the fringes of high school society, looked down on by classmates.  We learn that he is beaten routinely by his single father, an ex-cop, an ex-soldier from World War II, a guy whose life has been on one long downhill trajectory. 

Stories about friendship between high school "brains" and "losers" aren't that rare.  I've never found these friendships convincing; nothing in my own high school experiences suggested their likelihood.  But Slouka makes it work.  Jon is a Jewish intellectual, but he's not timid, he's not overly "refined," and he's totally adrift from any security and sense of belonging that his own family might have offered him.  Ray's no scholar, but he's not stupid, and his reputation for brawling is, to a large degree, merely a cover for the obvious injuries he receives from his own father.  Ray's efforts to shield his infant brother from his father's abuse are touching, as is the romantic relationship that he eventually develops with Karen, a classmate who initially attracted Jon until Jon realized that Karen's feelings for him did not go beyond simple (but close) friendship.

Jon, Ray and Karen form a triumvirate of friendship, outside Brewster society, joined by an unlikely (but likeable) devout Christian -- Fred.  Except for Ray, these teenagers participate to some degree in Brewster student life without ever becoming part of it.  Each of them, in his own way, looks forward to the day they escape Brewster.  Jon and Ray dream of restoring an old car and driving off with Karen and maybe Fred to California -- the classical dream of disaffected American youth.

This plot synopsis doesn't do justice to the book, because so much of the book is a presentation of mood.  The loving description of all the markers of American "hip" civilization in the late '60s -- a civilization surrounding the kids but one that never really makes an impression on them.  The sense of Brewster as a a prison: a cold village, isolated from major trends in society, hostile to curiosity, to excitement -- where dreams go to die. 

And over all, the looming sense of danger -- hanging over the other senses of futility, of the impossibility of finding any joy or hope in one's life.  From the first chapter, we sense some menace threatening (not necessarily physically) Jon's life  -- threatening all four friends' lives -- a menace alluded to over and over as the narrative continues.  We gradually gain some idea of the source of the menace, and even of its nature.

But when we ultimately face the menace face to face, we're still shocked.  Shocked by Jon's graphic description of what he witnesses.  Shocked by its effect on each of the four friends' lives.  Shocked by the devastation visited on their friendship.

And shocked by our own appreciation -- an appreciation rarely encouraged by contemporary fiction -- that Evil sometimes actually exists.  Evil not subject to being minimized by our ability to be "understanding"  -- Evil fully worthy of being written with a capital letter.