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.
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