CANR
WORK TITLE: All That Is Left Is All That Matters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1958
WEBSITE: https://www.markslouka.com/
CITY: Canton
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 237
http://www.stlawu.edu/academics/programs/english/directory/3236 http://www.stlawu.edu/news/markslouka_nychonors.html http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/1494/prmID/1528
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in NY; married; wife’s name Leslie; children: Zack and Maya.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A. (cum laude), M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Columbia University, New York, NY, associate professor of creative writing; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, professor of English and chair of the Committee on Creative Writing. Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY. Has also lectured at University of California, San Diego, CA; Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA; and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
AWARDS:Teacher of the Year, University of California, San Diego, 1993-94; National Magazine Award in Fiction, 1995, for “The Woodcarver’s Tale”; New York Times Notable Book, 1998, and California Book Award, 1999, both for Lost Lake; San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year and Washington Post Book of the Year, both 2002, for God’s Fool; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2005; PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, 2011, for Essays from the Nick of Time; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
WRITINGS
Harper’s magazine, contributing editor. Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire, San Francisco Chronicle, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Orion, Bomb, Paris Review, Agni, and Granta. Work featured in Best American Essays, 1999, 2000, 2004, and Best American Short Stories, 2006, 2011.
SIDELIGHTS
Mark Slouka, who more recently has pursued fiction writing, had his publishing debut with a book that analyzes the negative influence of the Internet on society, culture, and human values. Many reviewers considered War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-Tech Assault on Reality to be a corrective to the enthusiastically positive light cast on technological developments of the late twentieth century. Examples of promoters of the Internet and the information superhighway included Republican Newt Gingrich and Democrat Al Gore, both of whom publicly proclaimed the economic and social advantages of the new technology during the 1990s. Slouka was widely criticized, however, for overstating his case, particularly in comparing users of the Internet to followers of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
While Slouka was given credit for providing a timely warning about what he perceives to be a naively open attitude toward the endless reproduction of alternative realities via high technology, his failure to find any redeeming characteristics in the Internet or its users left him open to the label “extremist.” Lee Dembart, a critic for the Los Angeles Times, summarized the best and worst of Slouka’s effort: “On the one hand, we should thank him for challenging the conventional wisdom” about the advantages that accrue to those conversant with the Internet. “On the other hand,” Dembart continued, “ War of the Worlds is … so extreme in its condemnation that it seriously weakens the good points the author makes.”
At the heart of Slouka’s critique of cyberspace and cyberists—cyber theorists—is an analysis of how real life—known as R.L. on the Internet—becomes devalued. Even those who are not yet online are to be found in front of another kind of screen, the television, rather than out in the world participating in real life, interacting in meaningful ways with real people. Slouka “writes about these matters with enormous energy and ardor,” according to New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. Indeed, other reviewers have commented on the moving portrait Slouka paints of victims of cyberspace, young people who spend their days in front of computer screens and then attend a music concert where the performance is presented on a large overhead screen; others tuned into cyberspace after school or work are drawn into illicit relationships that implicitly call their very identities into question. “ War of the Worlds is an appeal, in effect, to the spirit of our age, warning it not to go too far in the creation of an alternative electronic ‘reality,’” wrote Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in the Washington Post Book World.
Even those critics who were sympathetic with Slouka’s dire warnings about the ill effects of the Internet found his arguments to be marred by hyperbole. More than one critic singled out the extremism of the author’s comparison between the cyberists’ enthusiasm for a worldwide community of the mind with the roar of the crowds at Nuremberg cheering on Chancellor Hitler. Such brash overstatement “distracts the reader from Mr. Slouka’s many more convincing ideas,” remarked Kakutani, “and undermines the authority of what is otherwise a timely and provocative book.” Other reviewers, however, emphasized the fundamental accuracy of the portrait Slouka paints. “His thoughtful, provocative critique deflates the giddy, messianic claims of digital-revolution proponents,” cheered a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.
Slouka’s other works include a collection of short fiction titled Lost Lake. The volume’s interrelated tales, mostly told by the same narrator, all concern fishing in waters located near a community of Czech immigrants in New York State. Lost Lake earned the praise of many reviewers. For instance, New York Times Book Review critic Gary Amdahl called the volume “beautiful and mysterious fiction” and added that “what distinguishes Slouka is his insistent message that life and death cannot be separated, even for a moment.” Similarly, Library Journal contributor Patrick Sullivan wrote that the stories in Lost Lake are “lyrical and beautifully written.”
God’s Fool, Slouka’s first novel, was published in 2002. Like Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng, it is a fictionalized version of the life stories of the famous Siamese (conjoined) twins Chang and Eng Bunker. Again, Slouka’s writing met with positive remarks from many critics. John Green praised the book in Booklist as a “sprawling, beautiful novel that touches on everything from slavery to the shadows of unremembered memory.” Emily Hall, while less enthusiastic in her piece for the New York Times Book Review, concluded that Slouka “is at his best when describing the splendors and degradations of Paris and London in the mid-19th century.”
Slouka’s next book, The Visible World, utilizes a unique structure to tell the stories of Slouka’s parents, relying on both fictional and nonfictional perspectives. The book’s first section is a memoir of Slouka’s childhood as the son of two Czech immigrants, both of whom survived the World War II era. His mother was devastated after the death of her lover during the war, and even after a subsequent marriage and the birth of her children, she continued to hold a torch for him. Her suicide at the age of sixty-four prompted Slouka to travel to Czechoslovakia to uncover the secrets of his parents’ pasts. At this point in the book, Slouka begins a fictional account of what he believes transpired between his parents back in the 1940s, and what led his mother to a life full of sadness and regret.
In a review for the New York Times Book Review, Eva Hoffman wrote that Slouka has “a knack for conveying errant details and impressions, the sense of promise and of sheer haphazardness that constitutes a traveler’s reality.” Hoffman ultimately described the book as “a delicately imagined and beautifully rendered novel. The descriptions of nature are precise and sensuous; the vignettes of minor characters vivid and razor sharp.” Pam Houston remarked in O, the Oprah Magazine that the “real genius of The Visible World is the way it challenges the division between fiction and nonfiction.” A critic for Publishers Weekly found the suspense “well paced, and the action scenes are vividly recounted. Slouka’s novel has a poignant verve.”
In Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations, Slouka muses on matters of modernity, history, fiction, pop culture, psychology, politics, technology, reason, authority, and free will. Individual essays include meditations on silence, corporate culture, and the educational emphasis on math and science at the expense of the humanities. Balancing sometimes oppositional notions, Slouka suggests his reader consider critically a lifestyle governed by technological interruption and corporate values.
On his blog, Conversational Reading, critic Scott Esposito wrote: “[Slouka] eschews all the razzle dazzle stunt nonsense and just writes some very thoughtful, very honest and original stuff that has made me think.” Diane Leach, writing for the Web site PopMatters, opined that “Slouka’s essays make alarming, though-provoking reading.” Writing for the Sycamore Review Web site, Yubraj Aryal concluded: “The vivid, varied, and lively imageries from American cultural lives, and their underpinning ironical meanings, make the collections superb.” “ Essays from the Nick of Time celebrates the mixed blessing of living with awareness in the world,” wrote ForeWord contributor Claire Rudy Foster. “Slouka raises a sometimes cynical glass to the chaotic party that surges around all of us—the mad mix of humanity, history, and hope.”
Slouka’s 2013 novel Brewster follows the troubled teenager Jon Mosher, stuck in the dead-end, blue-collar town of Brewster, New York in 1968, who channels his angst by running track. His friend Ray Cappicciano picks fights and protects his baby brother from his sadistic and abusive ex-cop father. When Ray falls in love with Karen Dorsey, the three teenagers plan to leave town and all their troubles behind. “It’s a gripping, gritty narrative of teenage rebellion in equal parts Bruce Springsteen and Alan Sillitoe” that suggests a dark undertow of suburbia, noted Guardian reviewer Alfred Hickling. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “The stripped-down prose style in his masterful coming-of-age novel recalls the likes of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.”
Writing the book felt like a homecoming to Slouka who grew up in Brewster. He told Eleanor Henderson in an interview online at Medium: “I think every writer returns to the same well, whether he or she realizes it or not; my earlier novels were about the burdens of history, of memory, of fate; you could say the same is true for Brewster. It’s like the more we try to get away from ourselves, to go somewhere entirely new, the deeper into ourselves we mine.”
In his 2016 memoir, Nobody’s Son, Slouka chronicles his upbringing in Czechoslovakia, his parents surviving the Nazis, and their immigration to New York. Spanning the past century, Slouka describes refugees, displacement, emotional baggage, and denial, and writes that his mentally ill mother, Olga, and his father languished in the cultural wasteland of their Bethlehem, Pennsylvania suburb. “With starkly vivid imagery and an elegiac, dreamlike cadence, Slouka conveys the precariousness of a childhood” spent struggling to have a close relationship with his mother, noted Booklist writer Carol Haggas. “Madness, war, persecution, and suburban anomie warp a family in this sometimes grim, sometimes luminous memoir,” observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
Slouka told Lily Meyer in an interview online at Electric Lit that he wrote the book in only seven months, “This book is a rescue operation as much as a memoir. …There was a sense of unburdening, of clarity, of seeing the light ahead.” Sarah Jackman remarked on Bookreporter.com: “While the heartbreak is more prominent than joy … moments of happiness find their way through the fog of war, marital hell and exile. Slouka cleverly closes the book with a moment that could be from the past or the present. He doesn’t believe in endings.”
Slouka next published the 2018, All That Is Left Is All That Matters, a collection of fifteen stories of love, loss, and encroaching death set in occupied Czechoslovakia, California’s Central Valley, and the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. With humor, moments of redemption, and the supernatural, the stories explore desire, injustice, comfort, death, and reality. A father who feels like a failure fords a dangerous river with his son, a shut-in who has not seen the front of her house for sixteen years is visited by an intruder, a young couple is facing the end of their marriage, a man’s dog begins to sprout razor blades on her skin, and a boy shields his father from painful memories of the Holocaust.
In his crisp, poignant, nostalgic, and often downbeat tales, Slouka offers stories that “are subtle, meditative, well-crafted stories, death-backed but life-affirming,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the stories, vibrating with danger, “create the sense of a world where unendurable loss is just one misplaced footstep away.” Sonia Chopra said on Bookreporter.com that the stories are well-crafted but not uplifting, and “They reiterate that life is short, and death is just a few paces away. This is serious literature with well-planned plots that are enriched with symbolism.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2002, John Green, review of God’s Fool, p. 1511; September 1, 2016, Carol Haggas, review of Nobody’s Son, p. 31.
ForeWord, December 19, 2010, Claire Rudy Foster, review of Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations.
Guardian, September 21, 2013, Alfred Hickling, review of Brewster, p. 14.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of All That Is Left Is All That Matters.
Library Journal, June 1, 1998, Patrick Sullivan, review of Lost Lake, p. 165.
Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1995, Lee Dembart, review of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-Tech Assault on Reality, p. 5.
New York Times, August 8, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, review of War of the Worlds, p. C16.
New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1998, Gary Amdahl, “Still Waters,” review of Lost Lake, p. 16; May 26, 2002, Emily Hall, review of God’s Fool, p. 17; April 19, 2007, Eva Hoffman, review of The Visible World.
O, the Oprah Magazine, April, 2007, Pam Houston, review of The Visible World, p. 190.
Publishers Weekly, July 10, 1995, review of War of the Worlds, p. 50; December 4, 2006, review of The Visible World, p. 31; April 8, 2013, review of Brewster, p. 36; August 29, 2016, review of Nobody’s Son, p. 80; May 7, 2018, review of All That Is Left Is All That Matters, p. 43.
Washington Post Book World, November 5, 1995, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, review of War of the Worlds, p. 8.
ONLINE
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (October 28, 2016), Sarah Jackman, review of Nobody’s Son; (June 29, 2018), Sonia Chopra, review of All That Is Left Is All That Matters.
Conversational Reading, http:// conversationalreading.com/ (February 9, 2011), Scott Esposito, review of Essays from the Nick of Time.
Electric Lit, https://electricliterature.com/ (October 27, 2016), Lily Meyer, author interview.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (August 19, 2013), Eleanor Henderson, author interview.
Newcity Lit, http://lit.newcity.com/ (February 2, 2011), review of Essays from the Nick of Time.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (November 15, 2010), Diane Leach, review of Essays from the Nick of Time.
St. Lawrence University website, http://www.stlawu.edu/ (October 17, 2011), “Prestigious Writing Honors Go to Visiting SLU Prof.”
Sycamore Review, http://www.sycamorereview.com/ (January 1, 2011), Yubral Aryal, review of Essays from the Nick of Time.
Mark Slouka's short fiction has featured in Best American Short Stories and has been awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He is a Contributing Editor at Harper's, and the author of The Woodcarver's Tale and God's Fool (Knopf and Picador). He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago.
Mark Slouka
Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing
Richardson Hall
mslouka@stlawu.edu
Mark Slouka
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Mark Slouka is an American novelist and essayist. The son of Czech immigrants,[1] he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine.
His 2013 novel Brewster was called "instantly mesmerizing" by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan.[2]
The subject matter of his 1996 book War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Assault on Reality encompasses the extent to which virtual reality and blurring of real life with corporate fantasy has become a "genuine cultural phenomenon".[3]
In 2003, his first novel God's Fool fictionalised the life of Siamese twins, Chang and Eng.[4] and his 2006 short story "Dominion", originally published in TriQuarterly, was included within the anthology Best American Short Stories 2006. His short story "The Hare's Mask," originally published in Harper's, was included in the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2011.
An essay of his entitled "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life" appeared in the 2004 anthology Audio Cultures. In this essay, Slouka inputs concepts and questions that pose a philosophical debate as to what silence is. Can silence really exist, or is it just what people decide to ignore that makes silence? Although people take notice of the visual landscape of our world, the change in aural landscape goes by seemingly unnoticed. Slouka views death as silence and, in some regards, it is because a human lacks the ability to hear any longer. Fear of silence is what creates the drive for noise and music. Slouka even says "fear forces our hand, inspires us, makes visible the things we love." Silence is an entity that brings out curiosity and there are other ways of describing it. Mainly, Slouka's contribution to the book made for some contrasting ideologies between musicians and authors such as Mark Slouka.
In his book Essays from the Nick of Time, Slouka argues that "The humanities are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values" [5] In one of the essays, "Quitting the Paint Factory," he states, "Idleness is ... requisite to the construction of a complete human being;... allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it."
His second novel, The Visible World, tells the story of a son uncovering his flawed parents' earlier life in the Czech resistance.[6] It gained notability in the UK following its inclusion in the 2008 Richard & Judy Book Club list.
In 2011, Slouka received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Essays from the Nick of Time.[7]
Bibliography[edit]
Year
Title
Publisher
2018
All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories
W. W. Norton & Company
2016
Nobody's Son: A Memoir
W. W. Norton & Company
2013
Brewster: A Novel
W. W. Norton & Company
2010
Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations
Graywolf Press
2007
The Visible World: A Novel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2002
God's Fool: A Novel
Alfred A. Knopf
1998
Lost Lake: Stories
Alfred A. Knopf
1995
War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-tech Assault on Reality
Basic Books
About Mark Slouka
Mark Slouka is the internationally recognized author of six books. Both his fiction and nonfiction have been translated into sixteen languages. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and his essays have appeared three times for Best American Essays. His stories, "Crossing" and "The Hare's Mask," have also been selected for the PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories. In 2008, he was a finalist for the British Book Award for his novel The Visible World, and his 2011 collection of essays, Essays from the Nick of Time, received the PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A contributing editor to Harpers Magazine since 2001, his work also appears in Ploughshares, Orion Magazine, Bomb, The Paris Review, Agni, and Granta. A Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago. He is currently living with his family in Brewster, NY.
Mark Slouka Will Not Flinch
The author bares all in a powerful new memoir.
Photo credit Maya Slouka
Mark Slouka is no stranger to authordom. He’s published six books, fiction and nonfiction. His work has been in Best American Fiction and Best American Essays both. He’s won awards. He’s done some press, you know? And yet as I prepared for this conversation, I kept thinking, God, he must be so worried about what I’m going to say.
Even by the standards of memoir, Nobody’s Son (W.W. Norton & Co., 2016) is personal. It’s not heart-baring so much as bone-baring: look, this is how I work inside. These are the veins, this is the tissue. This is all I am. Lucky for Slouka, he happens to express his innermost thoughts and pore over his darkest memories in laconic, gorgeous prose.
Nobody’s Son travels from Slouka’s mother’s abuse-filled childhood in Czechoslovakia to the post-World War II refugee world on four continents to Brewster, New York, where a novelist realizes he’s been writing about himself in disguise. It would have been cheesy to call this book Portrait of the Writer as a Son, but that’s what it is. Well, it’s all kinds of portraits, but that’s the first and central one. The rest? You’ll see.
Lily Meyer: You must be very scared of interviewers for this book.
Mark Slouka: When you have personal material, it’s hard not to be invested. But this book is a rescue operation as much as a memoir. It had to be written. It had been sitting back there for forty years, so by the time I got to it — no, by the time it mugged me, which is more how I feel about it, it was like, What the hell is happening — anyway, by the time I got to it, it just poured out of me. I don’t even remember writing big chunks of it. The book just went. Seven, eight months and it was done. Like literature in a microwave. And now here it is, my heart with a cover on it.
LM: I am shocked to hear that. This book is so formally aware of itself, so calculated-seeming, I was sure that you’d been writing it for years.
MS: Nope, seven months. I wrote it in a kind of white heat. Five, six hours a day, and I wouldn’t notice the time. I’d stand up and my back would be locked. But I was so happy! There was a sense of unburdening, of clarity, of seeing the light ahead. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that kind of creative energy again.
LM: How much did you edit? And what was that process like?
MS: I’m an obsessive re-writer, but I re-write from the beginning, continually. If I don’t have the first stone correctly laid, I can’t put another one on top. So when I sit down in the morning, I read through what came before and prune, adjust, re-write. By the time I’ve finished a draft to my satisfaction, then, it’s a finished book. Though I should say, I believe that Hemingway line that any story can be made better by being made shorter, so there was some condensing and distilling at the end.
LM: Who is this book a portrait of first, or most?
MS: It’s a self-portrait in the sense that I’m thinking about my past, my history, the story I inherited, the ghosts that were handed down to me. It’s a portrait of my parents, too, but from there I’d have to say it’s a portrait of memory and how memory works, how memory spills into fiction all the time. And it’s a portrait of abuse, and how abuse is handed from generation to generation. It took me a long time to understand that the abuse my mother suffered changed forms and then came down to me.
It’s an argument for the defense, too. I’m trying to say, Listen, I was a good son. At some point I had to pull away from my mother, and I carried a lot of guilt for that, so part of this book was a self-exoneration. It’s one of those big baggy many-thing books, which I happen to have a real affection for. It doesn’t fit neatly into a genre, which is fine, since I’m not completely sure I believe in the genres.
LM: Something you didn’t say is that this book is a portrait of a writer, and of the writing process.
MS: I suppose it is. The process is so much a part of who I am, maybe it’s invisible to me. But it was embarrassing to think back on Brewster or on some of my short stories — on a good many things I’ve written — and think, Good God, man, you just didn’t see what you were trying to say. You didn’t know what you were writing about. So yes, it’s about self-revelation through writing.
LM: You flag what you’re doing very explicitly, too. You spend the whole beginning writing about how you’re beginning, and then there’s a point about forty pages in where you say, “Might as well begin with the end.” Same at the end, too. You say, “I’m ending now, I’m ending now,” and then the book ends. The reader can watch you watch yourself writing.
MS: That’s what was so liberating about it. I’ve always hidden myself in my books, and suddenly it was like, Get your ass out on the microscope slide. I’m going to take a look at you. I tried to look at myself as objectively as possible, and I had to do that through the lens of my parents and my history. But the more I did that, the more I understood that chronology just isn’t useful to me. Take an ending: when is it really an end? My father died three years ago; I dreamt about him three nights ago. He’s very vivid to me. I’m more interested in how we navigate our memories and histories than in chronology.
LM: You contrast that experience to what you call Big History, which you define as thing follows thing.
MS: Well, certain things happened! I have no patience with revisionism. Certain things happen in big and small history both, but once a thing has passed, we shape it into a story. We leave certain parts out, stress other parts. Once an event is in the past it becomes a kind of fiction.
Once an event is in the past it becomes a kind of fiction.
LM: It does seem that your mother is more resistant to your storytelling than anyone else. As a reader, I felt like I was chasing her through the book.
MS: Well, we were impossibly close when I was a child. The sound of her laughter is something I’ll remember the rest of my life. She was so fun to be with, and that’s what made what followed so extraordinarily difficult. For a long time, I didn’t understand, and for a long time after that I tried to save her, and after that was the anger and sense of betrayal, and then I was just fighting to save myself.
LM: You don’t spend much explicit time on your mother’s being a survivor of sexual abuse, or on your mother’s addiction. Why does that come so late in the memoir? And why does her lover come so late in the memoir?
MS: The drugs come late because I discovered them late. I was fifty-six years old before my father told me my mother had been an addict for the better part of thirty years. How she remained standing is beyond comprehension. As far as F., her lover, goes, I don’t know if I can answer why he appears in the memoir where he does, but I can say that I think of him as the core of this memoir. You know, it’s kind of a love story, really. I remember him very well; I thought he was a wonderful man, and I think he came really close to saving my mother.
LM: I’m fascinated by the total lack of shame in Nobody’s Son, and in the way you’re talking to me about it now. How did you learn that lack of shame?
MS: When I was a teenager and my family life began to go sideways, I developed a willingness to look at myself. That’s how you learn to see outside you, by looking at yourself. I really believe that. So shame is not something that plays a big role in my life. That’s not to say that writing this memoir wasn’t excruciating. I had this notion of my mother pleading with me, saying, Don’t do this. It felt like a brick in my chest, the idea of her begging me not to write it. I externalized that feeling. I put it in the book. I’d sit there with tears in my eyes, unable to write, and then I’d remember how much my mother believed in literature. She was a librarian for thirty years, and a real reader. Books were almost a religion to her. And her standard for writers was always fearlessness. A writer shouldn’t flinch. If you’re going to flinch, find something else to do; if you’re going to write, then fucking well write.
A writer shouldn’t flinch. If you’re going to flinch, find something else to do; if you’re going to write, then fucking well write.
LM: Are you working on another book now?
MS: I’ve been working on a sequel to Brewster. The protagonist there was thirty years old, and he’s fifty-eight now. And there’s another book that has to do with Milan Kundera, but it’s harder to describe.
LM: Does it feel different to write fiction having written this memoir?
MS: Absolutely. This was a liberation book for me. It freed up my voice, I think, and unclouded my vision. There’s something about having written in this naked first person that was liberating creatively in ways so big I haven’t figured them out completely. It’s like I’m ambidextrous now, or like I’ve added something new. Sitting down to write feels different now. It feels good.
September 2013
Sean P. Carroll
features
An Interview with Mark Slouka
Mark Slouka's fiction might best be described as subtly potent. Since his debut collection of stories, Lost Lake (1998), which chronicles a summer community of Czech immigrants in upstate New York, he has crafted narratives of emotional depth and complexity without resorting to the clangorous tics of lesser writers more concerned with form than substance. His first novel, God's Fool (2002), charts the peripatetic life of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng but focuses more on their pursuit of a quiet happiness as farmers in the North Carolina countryside rather than reveling in their sensationalistic turn with Barnum's sideshow. Slouka's second novel, The Visible World (2007), attempts to explicate the personal history of a family haunted by the ghosts of World War II as the unnamed narrator voyages to Prague to unearth the secrets of his mother's early life and unable to resolve these mysteries he boldly reimagines a linchpin event of the war with her as a key participant.
Slouka's latest novel, Brewster, is set in that namesake town amidst the backdrop of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of trafficking in the cultural signposts of that era Slouka masterfully delineates the friendship between narrator Jon Mosher and Ray Cappicciano, the proverbial unruly outcast. Both boys are scarred by family tragedy and violence, and they find in one another the only acceptance each has ever had. Hemmed in by the strictures of community and family, Jon turns to running track as an outlet, while Ray embarks on a fraught relationship with Karen Dorsey, his only means of salvation. The dynamic between these disparate three and Ray's love for his baby brother Gene form the emotional crux of this book which leads to an ending that will leave the reader both hopeful and bereft.
Slouka is also the winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for his collection Essays from the Nick of Time (2010) and is the author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (1995).
This interview was conducted in person on the author's front porch in June and was followed up with an email exchange in July.
This book is a homecoming in both the real and fictional sense. You grew up around Brewster and recently moved back there. What spurred you to set this novel in your hometown? Did you have any trepidation about setting the book there or venturing into the often overwrought world of adolescence and the miasma of strong emotions that particular age entails?
I have this sense that books pick their authors, that what leads writers to particular stories or particular places is unknowable (until the book is written and we make something up to explain our motivation). Basically, I had to tell the story of these two boys, and I spent a long time figuring out how to do it, how to get out of its way.
Did I worry about the risks of writing about adolescence? Only to the extent that I wanted to get it right, to not condescend. The not condescending part was easy enough because I believe that life -- love, despair, dreams, desperation -- is lived at full throttle when we're young. Age teaches compromise at least as often as wisdom.
At the outset of the book Jon states that whenever he tries to remember Brewster or talk about his friends that all he can see is winter and ice. As the novel progresses, this season and its attendant hardships not only shroud the landscape in an opaque manner but also permeate the characters' burdened lives with an added element of unavoidable harshness. Do you think that the predominantly winter setting makes the environment of the book and your characters' relationship to it more tangible and realistic? In addition, does it help set the emotional tone of the book?
Winter is at least ten times as long as summer when you're eighteen, and I wanted to capture that feeling without calling attention to it. I mean, there are summer moments in Brewster -- moments I tried to fill with that sense of freedom, gone almost before we've noticed it -- but to be true to the story I was telling, it had to be set in winter. The picture I carried around in my head was of Ray leaning against a lamppost hugging himself in that crappy coat, his fingers numb with cold.
Jon finds an unexpected outlet for his confusion and pain when he is encouraged to try out for the track team by his history teacher (and track coach) Ed Falvo. Despite the physical suffering entailed, Jon slowly finds his place within the team and starts to have his first successes. Why is he drawn to this pursuit and is there a ritualistic aspect to it?
Obviously, Jon comes from a fairly fucked-up family, burdened by his brother's death, his mother's slide into depression, his own guilt... Running track offers him a kind of pain he can understand. The truth is, I get that -- maybe I ran for the same reason. Track is simple: run at x speed for y distance, and you will suffer; all you have to do is change the variables to match your fitness. Is there a ritualistic aspect to it? Maybe, at least for people like Jon. He says at some point that kids today cut themselves; he ran track. His way was better, but it was the same thing.
There is not a single incident that triggers the friendship between Ray and Jon. Instead, it seems that Ray is drawn to Jon for reasons he can't articulate, even to himself, and Jon seems to be more a part of the world when he is in Ray's company. What do you think Ray is seeking from Jon?
Clearly, the two answer some sort of need in each other. Ray is drawn to Jon because, coming from where he's coming from -- a world of unpredictable and profound brutality -- the world of books, of ideas, seems like a warm room and a blazing fire when you're lost in a blizzard. Jon, on the other hand, is desperate for approval, for friendship, for the kind of love that is rooted in respect -- precisely the things that his parents, dragging their own burdens, can't provide. What's interesting to me is that for a time, Jon and Ray each find the approval they can't find at home in each other's family. Which feels right to me: How often -- maybe because we didn't really know each other -- did I find a certain respect in the eyes of my friends' parents that I didn't necessarily feel at home?
Who do you think is the dominant personality between the two of them, and how does that determination subsequently influence your narrative?
Difficult question. I'd want to say Jon, because Ray looks up to him, defers to him (even though Ray's the tougher of the two by all the usual measures). But then I think of Jon's burdens -- his loneliness, his rage, his guilt -- and I compare them to Ray's relative clarity of mind, his courage, his loyalty, and I think no, it has to be Ray. Leave it at this: On some deep level, they recognize each other's pain, and that's more than enough for any friendship.
When Karen first appears it is Jon who "saw her first, fell in love with her first" and despite his initial thrill at their connection he realizes that there is an unrelenting eventuality to her attraction and love for Ray. What is it about Karen that makes her a unifying force between Jon and Ray? Do you think Jon is either consciously or subconsciously more concerned about Ray's happiness than his own? If so, why?
The thing about Karen is that she instinctively respects other people's autonomy; she makes it okay for them to be who they are. It's a form of acceptance that neither Jon nor Ray has had a whole lot of in his life. (Or, as Jon puts it, she can see how fucked up you are, and care about you anyway.) I like to think that if things had worked out differently, she and Jon would have been friends for life (and who knows, they may yet), but for her, Ray was the one, period. It happens. Jon, who loves them both, sees that, and is man enough to acknowledge it, in part because (you're dead-right here) Ray's friendship is the most important thing in his life.
In your previous work you have focused on the experience and perspective of first generation Americans and those burdened by genetic chance and the mantle of history. While you did grow up in and around New York why did you wait until now to tackle the native perspective? Did you have to exorcise your own history on the page before fully inhabiting and recreating Jon's, and your, America?
As a writer (or a human being, for that matter), you have to feel your way through this life; most of what we do is unconscious, and self-knowledge, if it comes at all, is retrospective. Did I first have to exorcise the past, my European and Czech heritage, to write Brewster? Christ, maybe I did, though I didn't know it at the time. And "exorcise" is not quite right. "Make peace with," maybe; "come to terms with." My last novel, The Visible World, was all about my parents' world and time, the stories they told, the lives they'd lived -- utterly European. And then something happened. I was born and raised in America; I couldn't do the same thing anymore. But it wasn't that easy -- it took years to shed the old skin. Jon, who is me in more ways than I care to admit, led me back to myself, made it all right.
Looking back, though, Brewster was clearly a rite of passage for me; the fact that my father -- the master storyteller in my life -- died the day after I finished it, confirms it.
You have mentioned that you find water to have very magical properties. Your collection of stories, Lost Lake, illustrates this belief in abundance, and the area makes an Edenic cameo in Brewster and contains the only unmitigated experience of bliss that Jon has. What does the real Lost Lake mean to you? How important is it to your creative process and personal happiness?
What does Lost Lake mean to me? Pretty much everything. It's the rivet in my life, the only constant (I'm talking place, not people) I've known. I grew up there, our kids (mostly) grew up there. For five months out of the year I write in an eight-by-eight shack with no electricity that my father wrote his dissertation in fifty years ago, maybe a five minute walk through the woods from our cabin. Lost Lake is fragile now -- surrounded. I don't care. I feel like the bullfrogs in the cove are talking to me, the Red Tails hunting in the understory, showing off for me. The rain on the roof of our cabin knows my name. I can't talk about it without sounding like a fool. The thought of it being "developed" into some subdivision scares me shitless; I've dreamed about that happening, more than once -- they're loneliest dreams I've known.
In 2010 Graywolf published Essays from the Nick of Time, many of which were culled from the pages of Harper's, where you are a contributing editor. This volume was divided into two sections, "Reflections" and "Refutations." Are these classifications shorthand for your philosophy of the personal essay?
I don't know that I have a philosophy of the personal essay, but I guess "reflections" and "refutations" might do as categories. I write essays because I've come across something that intrigues or troubles me, and the essay is my way of getting at it, or because there's something I want to celebrate (leisure time, let's say) that's been neglected, or because something's pissed me off (how can you be alive in the world and not be political?) and writing about it saves me from getting into fights or hitting the Scotch.
What sort of role and effect does this type of essay have in our society and literary culture?
I'd say zero, basically. Literature has devolved into entertainment; if it doesn't distract us, we're not interested. My problem is that I admire essays that aren't necessarily all hipness and voice, the ones that wrestle with complexity, that are meant for adult consumption. Which may explain why my own tend to disappear like pebbles in a pond.
There's glory in thumbing your nose at the market; the trick is figuring out how to stay alive while you're doing it. So far I'm managing it.
The darker side of the family dynamic is explored throughout this book. While you have the emotional and physical abuse suffered by Jon and Ray there are also set pieces of casual violence and misguided tough love both on the page and off. In counterpoint to this theme you have Ray's fierce protectiveness of his baby brother Gene; something that Ray was never afforded. Why is Ray so willing to sacrifice himself for Gene? Is his selfless behavior a stark contrast to how the town treats him?
Absolutely. I had a friend when I was growing up (a tough kid from Bed-Stuy, back when it was still Italian-Irish) who had a baby brother named Gene. Gene was the sweetest kid I ever knew until my own kids came along twenty years later. Anyway, my friend would've lain down on the tracks for little Gene, and not having any brothers or sisters myself, I remember being very impressed by this. It was like every hit he took (and he took more than his share) made him that much more determined to protect his brother. I don't know that I did it consciously, but I must have drawn on the two of them while writing Ray and Gene. People react to abuse in a million ways, but basically it comes down to this: you can either pass it on or you can end it. My friend ended it. In our own lives, my wife and I ended it. Ray (and Jon in his way) ends it as well.
How difficult was it for you to let go of Jon's voice? Do you feel like there is more of his story left to tell?
It's always difficult to let go of a voice you've lived with for years; I've dreamed about my characters after the books are done.
Is there more to Jon's story? There is. Though sequels can be such cop-outs for writers, it's becoming obvious to me that Jon's not done with me yet -- not by a long shot. Here's what I know: he's fifty-eight, married to a woman named Alice, hiding in a high-desert town in Arizona I've come to know well, and on the run from her ex. I can't say more than that without letting air out of the story.
Brewster is your fourth work of fiction including your debut, Lost Lake, which was published in 1998, so this question might be premature but have you started working on anything new? Any chance you will return to the short story form?
Though I may be following Jon for a while, there's no way I could ever stop writing stories. Still, they tend to come when they choose; there's a certain itch -- an idea, a bit of a dream -- and you build on that. I'll admit, I don't write many -- I wish I could. I've had a few in the past few years -- "Crossing" in The Paris Review, "The Hare's Mask" in Harper's -- that I'm pleased with, that took a lot out of me in ways I only partly understand. But the well's filling up again. I'll be back. It's what I do.
W. W. NortonFollow
Independent publishers since 1923. www.wwnorton.com
Aug 19, 2013
Mark Slouka
Mark Slouka: “I feel like I’ve just begun, just woken up”
Mark Slouka is the author of four works of fiction. The most recent, Brewster, is the powerful story of an unforgettable friendship between two teenage boys and oftheir hopes for escape from a dead-end town. In the New York Times, novelist Eleanor Henderson described Slouka’s storytelling as, “sure and patient, deceptively steady and devastatingly agile.”
Here, Henderson talks to Slouka about writing, running, and his literary homecoming.
Eleanor Henderson: One of the things I love about the way you depict Brewster is that you manage to make it feel both real (which it is) and larger than life. What kind of creative muscles did you use when writing about a place you know so well?
Mark Slouka: I wrote half of Brewster looking out at it, as I’m looking out at it now: the house across the street has a flag nailed vertically to the wall under the porch which I just stuck directly into the novel. But the physical place is just a trellis, and a flimsy one at that; it’s what your imagination hangs on it that matters. I wrote the second half of the novel in a shack in the woods, but by that point Brewster – less the actual place than a feeling, a time – was fully alive in my head. I find that until I’ve got that voice, that feeling – of loneliness, say, or regret, or love – that brings a place alive, I don’t have anything at all.
On my desk is a framed quote by Sir Philip Sidney that my daughter gave me a few years back: “Fool, said the Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.” Which I’ve tried to do, though I haven’t always liked the things I found there. My point is that while looking out, we’re looking in.
Do you run?
I do, mostly away from things. In Brewster Jon Mosher says he runs to feel a pain he can understand. I don’t carry his burdens, but I get that. I guess I run (I prefer the short, sharp stuff) for the same reasons my father did: to quiet the voices in my head, to pit myself against something tangible, to experience the sheer pleasure of covering ground. (I also make stupid little bets with myself: If I run under this time, then this will happen. Probably not healthy.)
The most common question I get about my novel [Ten Thousand Saints], and my least favorite, is “Why are the parents so terrible?” Reading Brewster, I thought, “Well, look at these folks!” And they’re terrible in very different ways. Ray’s father is the more obvious deadbeat, but weeks after reading the book, I’m still haunted by Jon’s mother and the chilling distance she places between herself and her son. Were you conscious of (or nervous about) casting particularly unsympathetic characters in the role of the parents? I’m thinking of Claire Messud’s recent response in Publishers Weekly about unlikable characters, and realizing that I’m now sort of asking you my least favorite question. Maybe I’m asking you for advice. How do you answer it?
Why are the parents so terrible? I guess my answer would have to be: because some are. It’s a matter of justice for me: There are few things as unfair, few things as weakening as being hated by someone who ought to be on your side. I met a woman at one of my readings recently whose mother had just passed away at the age of 104 without ever having told her daughter she was OK. It broke my heart. In my own case, my mother loved me as a little boy, then spent the next fifty years mourning the perfect child she’d lost; I remember being twelve and saying “But I’m right here, I’m still your son.” I spent forty years fighting that battle – to be seen — and lost. Now she doesn’t know who I am, which is both very sad and strangely fitting.
What’s hard for me to understand, though, is that I didn’t realize that I’d literalized my relationship with my mother in Brewster until the novel was done. Our books write us, I swear.
What’s that great line near the beginning of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner? “My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.”
The jacket copy on Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude said something like it was “the book he was born to write.” I thought of that phrase while reading Brewster, probably because I sensed some significance in your returning to your hometown after writing about more far-flung places, and because the book feels similarly epic in scope in terms of the way it captures two friends’ coming of age during a particular cultural moment. Do you feel that this is the book you were born to write?
I’m flattered by the question, of course, but “the book you were born to write” sound a little like “The End,” and what writer wouldn’t run from that? What could possibly come next? I feel like I’ve just begun, just woken up. Brewster feels like a homecoming, a turn toward the books I was born to write, maybe, because it’s the first one in which I’ve given myself permission to just be here, to tell my own story. It took me a while. That said, I think every writer returns to the same well, whether he or she realizes it or not; my earlier novels were about the burdens of history, of memory, of fate; you could say the same is true for Brewster. It’s like the more we try to get away from ourselves, to go somewhere entirely new, the deeper into ourselves we mine. What a strange and wonderful business we’re in.
All That Is Left Is All That Matters
Publishers Weekly. 265.19 (May 7, 2018): p43+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
All That Is Left Is All That Matters
Mark Slouka. Norton, $24.95 (160p) ISBN 9780-393-34883-5
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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"All That Is Left Is All That Matters." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 43+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f13a4c3. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858653
Slouka, Mark: ALL THAT IS LEFT IS ALL THAT MATTERS
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Slouka, Mark ALL THAT IS LEFT IS ALL THAT MATTERS Norton (Adult Fiction) $24.95 6, 26 ISBN: 978-0-393-29228-2
The latest collection from Slouka (Brewster, 2013, etc.), whose work has won an O. Henry Prize and appeared in Best American Short Stories, features 15 crisp, poignant, mostly downbeat tales.
In the tender "Dominion," an elderly husband and wife, long married, find their home increasingly surrounded by coyotes and have to discover whether they have enough resilience left to withstand the invaders--the howling coydogs outside but also the slower, stealthier encroachments of death. "Half-Life" features a long-term shut-in--she glimpses her house's facade in a shot of a passing ambulance on the news, and it's the first time she's seen the front yard in 16 years--fighting off an unexpected kind of intruder. "Then" is a lovely, nostalgic story built around a brief chance meeting, 40-odd years later, of sexagenarian former lovers who are feeling their age. She invites him, in parting, to think of her sometime: of her "then." Which he does for the rest of the story, restoratively, and for a while the aches and jaded jokes and sadness of age are banished. In "Conception," a young couple at the end of their tethers--and perhaps at an end of their marriage--are brought back from the brink by an encounter with future infirmity in the form of a naked, fallen neighbor. A son tries vainly to protect his Holocaust survivor father from painful memories in the haunting "The Hare's Mask." And in "Crossing," a father trying to reconnect with his son and his own boyhood by re-creating the back-country campout he used to do with his dad finds himself in trouble as he fords a snowmelt-swelled river with his son on his back.
These are subtle, meditative, well-crafted stories, death-backed but life-affirming.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Slouka, Mark: ALL THAT IS LEFT IS ALL THAT MATTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375201/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8bd30ef8. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375201
Nobody's Son
Carol Haggas
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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Full Text:
Nobody's Son. By Mark Slouka. Oct. 2016. 304p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (9780393292305). 818.
Novelist (Brewster, 2013) and essayist Slouka's parents survived the Nazis and WWII, escaped their native Czechoslovakia during the postwar communist regime, and became displaced persons as newlyweds. As refugees, they shuffled from Austria to Australia and finally to America, dragging little material but great emotional baggage with them every step of the way. At times brutally honest, at others sweetly mournful, Slouka's anguished memoir of his life as their only child delves intrepidly into the mysteries of their past that haunted them then and him still: his mother's sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, her decades-long adulterous affair, hidden addictions, and barely contained bipolar disorder. With starkly vivid imagery and an elegiac, dreamlike cadence, Slouka conveys the precariousness of a childhood spent never knowing what aspect of his mother's volatile personality he'd have to confront nor understanding what precipitated her mercurial rages. Slouka has admirably covered these themes in his novels, but, as always, fiction pales compared to reality.--Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "Nobody's Son." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A463755031/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0204ffdc. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755031
Nobody's Son: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly. 263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p80.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Nobody's Son: A Memoir
Mark Slouka. Norton, $26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-393-29230-5
Madness, war, persecution, and suburban anomie warp a family in this sometimes grim, sometimes luminous memoir. Novelist Slouka (Brewster) is the son of Czechs who survived wartime German occupation, then fled the Communist regime to settle in the U.S., where they languished in the cultural wasteland of their Bethlehem, Pa., subdivision. Slouka's parents' epically bad marriage was dominated by the deepening mental illness of his mother, Olga, which featured paranoid delusions, shrieking rages over trivialities, and worse. Slouka foregrounds his claustrophobic relationship with Olga as it shifted from sunny warmth to hurricane-strength hatred and then, after decades, to a distance that gives insight into her polarities. (He suggests that she was molested by her father in her youth.) Slouka's reminiscences of his childhood are vivid and novelistic, but sometimes they become bogged down in ruminations on the fallibility of memory and middleclass American family dysfunctions he witnessed. The book shines when he imagines his parents' more compelling travails in the 1940s, supplemented by his own travel to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, where he discovered a hidden romance that's the key to Olga's character. In the end, he manages to recover deep personal meaning from tragic history. Photos. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nobody's Son: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A462236485/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6103489. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236485
Slouka, Mark: BREWSTER
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Slouka, Mark BREWSTER Norton (Adult Fiction) $25.95 8, 5 ISBN: 978-0-393-23975-1
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 �migr�s 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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Slouka, Mark: BREWSTER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2013. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A333599268/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=79975153. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A333599268
Brewster
Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist. 109.19-20 (June 1, 2013): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Brewster. By Mark Slouka, Aug. 2013. 256p. Norton, $25.95 (9780393239751).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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 paws humor and pain.--Joanne Wilkinson
YAIM: Athletic triumphs, romantic loss, and male friendship are at the center Of this heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in the 1960s.JW.
Wilkinson, Joanne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilkinson, Joanne. "Brewster." Booklist, 1 June 2013, p. 43. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A335921610/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=33b6720d. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A335921610
Slouka, Mark. Brewster
Robert E. Brown
Library Journal. 138.9 (May 15, 2013): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Slouka, Mark. Brewster. Norton. Aug. 2013. 256p. ISBN 9780393239751. $25.96. F
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
Brown, Robert E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brown, Robert E. "Slouka, Mark. Brewster." Library Journal, 15 May 2013, p. 72. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A330143009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=890aa8e6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A330143009
Brewster
Publishers Weekly. 260.14 (Apr. 8, 2013): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Brewster
Mark Slouka. Norton, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-23975-1
A simmering rage coupled with world-weary angst grip the four teenagers growing up as friends in Slouka's (Lost Lake) hardscrabble novel, set in the small blue-collar town' of Brewster, N.Y., where the author grew up. Jon Mosher--once a scholarship-winning high school track star, now a wistful, glum adult--narrates the group's tragic experiences during the winter of 1968. Feeling alienated from his community and his parents, German-Jewish emigres Sam and Vera, Jon first befriends the "erratic" Ray Cappiciano, who always looks banged up, supposedly from semipro middleweight boxing matches in out-of-town venues like the Bronx. The third friend, Frank Krapinski, is a javelin thrower and devout Christian. Rounding out the quartet is attractive Karen Dorsey, who rejects Jon's romantic interest to date the edgier Ray. Ray's father, a disturbed, sadistic ex-cop and WWII vet who collects Nazi body parts, supplies an undercurrent of violence that haunts the four teenagers' lives before boiling over at the surprising climax. Slouka's laconic dialogue resonates with regional authenticity, his late-1960s pop culture references ring true, and the stripped-down prose style in his masterful coming-of-age novel recalls the likes of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Brewster." Publishers Weekly, 8 Apr. 2013, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A326130857/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4d1006cf. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A326130857
Review: Fiction: Brewster by Mark Slouka (Portobello, pounds 12.99)
The Guardian (London, England). (Sept. 21, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Alfred Hickling
It's 1968, and though cultural revolution is supposedly in the air it has yet to permeate Brewster, a poisonously insular blue-collar town in upstate New York: "Woodstock may have been just across the river, but Brewster was a different world. It wasn't interested in getting back to the garden. It had to resurface the driveway, it had to mow the fuckin' lawn." Jon Mosher is a high-school misfit who discovers that he is born to run - his unexpected prowess on the track wins the friendship of Ray, an athletic delinquent whose penchant for brawling seems to have been developed to disguise the bruises inflicted by a sadistically abusive father. It's a gripping, gritty narrative of teenage rebellion in equal parts Bruce Springsteen and Alan Sillitoe, though Slouka's talent is the ability to suggest the dark undertow of suburbia through an immaculately chosen image and simple clarity of phrase: "I can remember summer evenings with kids running through the tunnels of smoke from the barbecues and the parents yelling 'If I catch you doin' that one more time.'
Alfred Hickling
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: Fiction: Brewster by Mark Slouka (Portobello, pounds 12.99)." Guardian [London, England], 21 Sept. 2013, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A343807405/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=768dd621. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A343807405
All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories
by Mark Slouka
Mark Slouka has written seven books, and they have been translated into 16 languages, making him an internationally known, critically acclaimed author. The son of Czech immigrants, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Chicago.
In ALL THAT IS LEFT IS ALL THAT MATTERS, a collection of 15 stories, Slouka paints eloquent portraits of average, everyday people as they grapple with life and its victories and triumphs. They fight not to be swept away by love, loss, death and circumstances beyond their control.
The characters in these stories live all over the world in places ranging from the author’s native Czechoslovakia to California. We don’t get to see them in long sequences; rather, we catch glimpses of them as they struggle with the immediate events of heartbreak and life-changing moments. It's a brief snapshot.
"This is serious literature with well-planned plots that are enriched with symbolism. It is meant to be contemplated and studied, preferably on a quiet rainy evening with a warm beverage."
In “Crossing,” a young father hopes to connect with his son, attempting to join his past with the present and the future, as they cross the river. They go to a place that the father had been talking about for years: “…the rivers, the elk, the steelhead in the pools --- since the boy was old enough to understand. And now here it was. He looked at the water, rushing slowly like flowing glass over car-size boulders nudged together like eggs.” And he is aware of the chance he has been given with his son: “He’d rebuild it all --- one step at a time. He and his son would be friends. Nothing mattered more.”
In “The Hare’s Mask,” a young son tries to protect his Holocaust survivor father from disturbing memories of killing rabbits to survive the food rationing. So he hides a hare mask under his pillow for days. One day, his father discovers him crying over it. The significance of the fact that it’s days before the boy’s ninth birthday, the same age the father was when he lost his family, is clear to them both.
In “Dominion,” an elderly husband and wife, long married, find that coyotes are circling their home, which becomes a metaphor for whether or not they can survive their inevitable deaths. The man, a recent retiree, evaluates his life “…weighing his life, adding a little dust here, a little there, shaking it in his palm, then raining it out like salt. The scales tipped and creaked.” What lies beyond the “four windows, open like mouths” of their house? “Beyond them was the known world: the lake, the boulders of the wall, the endless, shoreless forest.”
In “Conception”, a young couple fighting the death of their marriage gets an unexpected lift from an encounter with a fallen, naked neighbor. And in “Then,” former lovers bump into each other after 40 years. They are both old now, and she asks him to think of her as she was then.
The title sums it up effectively: all that is left is all that matters. Because that’s all we have to hold on to for whatever life we have left. But some of these moments are heavy, and you watch people grieve, travel back in time, and learn about the untruths they tell themselves to simply cope with their present and to justify the choices they have made. The stories are poignant and well-crafted, but not upbeat or uplifting. They reiterate that life is short, and death is just a few paces away. This is serious literature with well-planned plots that are enriched with symbolism. It is meant to be contemplated and studied, preferably on a quiet, rainy evening with a warm beverage.
Reviewed by Sonia Chopra on June 29, 2018
Nobody's Son: A Memoir
by Mark Slouka
“I don’t believe in beginnings. Or endings. I just don’t,” writes Mark Slouka at the end of his latest book, a gorgeously written memoir entitled NOBODY’S SON. The sentiment feels a bit ironic seeing as he’s a writer. But he holds firm and reiterates this point throughout the narrative as he relates the beginnings and endings and in-betweens of the perilous lives of his parents, and his life with them.
Zdenek and Olga Slouka were born in Czechoslovakia in the fragile peace that followed World War I and preceded the rise of the Reich. They married after World War II ended, after his mother’s father hid her in the coal piles of their basement so she wouldn’t be raped by Russian liberators --- those last four words seem like an oxymoron --- and his father was part of the Czech resistance.
When the Communist regime takes power of the small country in 1948, Slouka’s father is alerted to his impending arrest for taking part in the resistance during the war. They have a day or two to flee the country and seek refuge, along with millions of others displaced by the war, liberated from death camps with no homes to return to, or exiled by Communists. Eventually the Sloukas land in Sydney, then Munich, and finally New York, before returning in the twilight of their lives to their native, beloved Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution has effectively quashed their arrest warrants.
"Slouka knows how to craft a book, and in his capable hands...NOBODY’S SON becomes a tour de force.... His prose is beautiful and clever, the occasional hint of self-deprecation slipping in at just the right moment so the reader can hold it together."
There are multiple tales being told in NOBODY’S SON, and they all work in harmony to paint a heartbreaking portrait of the Slouka family’s history. It is not, the author warns early on, a linear story. Rather, it is a collection of memories, some more powerful and pertinent than others, that tell a story of refugees, parents, a child watching his mother slip into the throes of madness, true love found a year too late and lost a week too soon, a country patiently waiting for its oppressors to leave.
Slouka knows how to craft a book, and in his capable hands --- despite his oft-repeated discomfort at writing a memoir --- NOBODY’S SON becomes a tour de force. I read it with a pen in hand, underlining, making notes, starring chapters that had remarkable impact. His prose is beautiful and clever, the occasional hint of self-deprecation slipping in at just the right moment so the reader can hold it together.
Chapter XXXVI, subtly at first and then starkly, relates the plight of the refugee, how you and I don’t think it could happen to us, and then it does. I put the book down for a while after that chapter to let what Slouka had described fully sink into my psyche, to put myself in the shoes of the European refugees standing on a dock in Sydney, Australia in 1949, with nothing to their names but what they could carry, with no country, no homes, no language the local officials could understand. Slouka smartly but briefly references the current refugee crisis, taking the reader out of 1949 and into the present. A nod of recognition.
The heartbreak is palpable. A mother so far inside the darkest recesses of her mind she can no longer respond to the outside world. A father berated and abused by an unhappy wife, living with it for half a lifetime because he can find no other solution. Refugees in the Land of Promise: “They were the exceptions to the American Dream, pieces of the mosaic that didn’t quite fit… This was a different kind of exile, one with few solutions.”
While the heartbreak is more prominent than joy --- “And reality outran the dream. As it sometimes will.” --- moments of happiness find their way through the fog of war, marital hell and exile. Slouka cleverly closes the book with a moment that could be from the past or the present. He doesn’t believe in endings.
Reviewed by Sarah Jackman on October 28, 2016