Don't Look Back: Mark Slouka's coming-of-age novel, Brewster

Mark Slouka's novel Brewster edges toward its sad conclusion - this is not a sunny, nostalgic coming of age story but a dark, sometimes painful look back by a kid from a very troubled family whose best friend is from an even more troubled family - we learn well into the novel that in fact Ray Cap has not been going to boxing clubs to earn some spare cash but apparently is getting beaten up by his sadistic dad who becomes especially cruel when drunk. Sure, there are some very familiar, perhaps overly familiar, tropes in this novel - the smart girl from the "good" family who is drawn to the troubled but sensitive tough guy, the "band of outsiders" (as in many such novels or films and TV shows for that matter, I sometimes have trouble understanding why these smart, handsome, athletic kids are outsiders - in most settings they would be leaders - but maybe everyone in high school feels like an outsider in their depths of their soul) - but Slouka rises above the conventions in which he works, building a novel that's intelligent and engaging start to - almost - finish. To my running buddies, this is one of the few novels that writes about track and field with insight and intelligence - he really "gets" the feeling of being on a small-town high-school track team in the days of spikes and cinder tracks. Though it's a novel of an older man's reflection back on his childhood, we, oddly, know nothing about the narrator today - at least up the 200-page mark; usually, these types of narratives give a hint at least as to the course of the narrator's life and as to what prompted this reflection (Secret History, Canada - to site to examples); not so, here.