Was there a young man anywhere in the 1960s who didn't substitute his home town's name for that of Mobile in Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again?" In the case of 16-year-old Jon Mosher, that town is Brewster, N.Y--a blue-collar, small-minded place that he and his unlikely three best friends can't wait to escape. As he watches the "children of God... hitching backward up Route 22," he says, "Woodstock may have been just across the river, but Brewster was a different world."
Jon's German-Jewish immigrant father owns the town's shoe store. After the childhood death of his older brother, his parents turn inward, leaving the alienated Jon on his own to befriend Ray Cappicciano, the brawling son of an abusive alcoholic ex-cop; Frank Krapinski, a zealous Christian track teammate; and Karen Dorsey, a brainy beauty who chooses the pugnacious Ray over the introverted Jon. Together they navigate high school, smoke, drink beer, huddle in their bedrooms "listening to the Stones turned low, which doesn't work," and discuss Camus's The Stranger.
The tight foursome find strength in the shared challenges they face at home and their naïve dreams of escaping to a better future. However, just as Woodstock had its Altamont, a violent confrontation between Ray and his father changes the fates of all of them.
Slouka (God's Fool; Lost Lake) has an ear for the conversational ambivalence of the young in the tumultuous '60s of small-town America as well as a clear view of the fatalism such small-town life engenders. Sometimes, Bob Dylan notwithstanding, Memphis is no better than Mobile. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.