From the acclaimed author of Black Flies and Into the Savage Country and co-creator of top-ten Netflix hit Outer Banks, a powerful new novel of class striving and the precarious dynamics of brotherhood in the Chicago suburbs of the late 1970s.
"In our family, there was none of this crap about everyone being a winner," says Willie, the narrator, who looks back on his teen years--and his nearly mortal combat with his domineering older brother, Coyle. In the Brennan house four kids sleep in a single room, and are indoctrinated into "The Methods," a system of achievement and relentless striving, laced with a potent, sometimes violent version of sibling rivalry. The family is overseen by a raging bull of a father, a South Side tough guy who knocks them sideways when they don't perform well or follow his dictates. Rivals, enemies, and allies, the siblings contend with one another and their wealthy self-satisfied peers at New Trier, the famous upscale high school where the family has struggled to send them. Evoking their crucible of class struggle and peer pressures, Burke balances comedy, tragedy, and a fascinating cast of characters, delivering a book that reads like an instant classic--an unforgettable story of the intertwining of love and family violence, and of triumphant teen survival that echoes down through the years.
Release date:
August 4, 2020
Publisher:
Pantheon
Print pages:
288
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The four of us—the Brennan kids—were a tight-knit, tumultuous, bickering, cohesive mob. Our father was a Southside dreamer full of elaborate plans meant to advance the fortunes of his family. Coyle, the oldest kid, was our drill sergeant, implementing Dad’s extreme orders with an iron fist. Brave, exacting, and unrelenting, Coyle had a spartan sensibility. I’ll give an example.
One day in the sixth grade my friend Jimmy and I were drawing pictures of tanks and dragons while listening to Hot Rocks on a cassette deck. Coyle came into the doorway and stood there with a judgmental scowl, hanging on to the molding, suspicious of the chaotic sounds coming from the cassette player.
“What’s this music?” he said.
“Rolling Stones,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you know it?”
“I don’t listen to music,” Coyle said. “It’s a waste of time.”
That was Coyle in a nutshell. Music was a waste of time. Everything was a waste of time except work and school and sports and the marching orders from Dad. As far as I could see, Coyle’s whole purpose in life was fulfilling our father’s wishes.
I was the second-oldest kid in the family and the one most different from Coyle. I did not fulfill my father’s wishes in anything. I was not orderly. I was not diligent. I liked any book with a barbarian or spaceship on the cover. I played Dungeons and Dragons, which Coyle thought was about the lamest thing he could imagine. I had a notebook of poems and little stories and made movies on Dad’s video recorder, mustering my younger siblings to act in these productions, all of which Coyle thought, of course, was a waste of time.
Our family was poor. I should get that out of the way at the beginning. Dad was taking classes to get his teacher’s certificate, but in the meantime he had about six jobs—paper delivery, painter, roofer, renovator, tennis pro, maintenance. And while Dad was going through his endless rounds of drudgery, and Mom was cooking or cleaning or repairing the old house, Coyle was left in charge of his younger siblings. He liked being in charge. Coyle’s natural, domineering temperament flowered when he had subjects to rule over. And there was no one he liked to boss around more than me.
He pointed out that I didn’t fold my clothes in the right way. I scattered food when I fed the cats. I missed the corners when I swept floors. To his eye, everything about my methods was idiosyncratic and inefficient. But I didn’t care what he thought was the proper way. I wanted to do things my own way, which was endlessly irritating for him. And that was satisfying for me. Irritating Coyle was a side benefit to doing things in the way I wanted.
This pattern of instruction and resistance was the basis of our relationship for our childhood until the year I was twelve and Coyle was thirteen. That year, in the late winter of his eighth grade, my exacting older brother did something that surprised everyone: He refused to get a haircut.
Our mother cut our hair, so it wasn’t like we’d make an appointment or anything. Mom just said it was time for a cut and we’d sit on the high chair in the kitchen and she’d take out the scissors and hack away. Up to that point in his life Coyle had been utterly indifferent to his hair. He kept his hair short so it didn’t get in the way of his achievement in school and sports, but I don’t think he’d ever thought about how it looked. Worrying about your hair was for girls.
But on this day in February 1979, Mom told Coyle to get on the high chair and he said, “I’m not getting my hair cut. I don’t want to look like a geek.”
“Since when is having normal-length hair looking like a geek?” Mom said.
“Since now,” Coyle said.
And that was that. Coyle refused. And once Coyle decided on something it was almost impossible to get him to change his mind. Mom wasn’t going to war over a haircut. So she just told me to get on the chair instead.
“You want to be a hippie, I guess,” Dad said that night when he came home.
Dad was a swaggering, bustling bull of a man. He had a thick neck and arms so muscle-filled that they stuck out to the side. Excessive work was Dad’s religion. He didn’t put up with back talk or resistance to his schemes. But I think Dad was secretly pleased that diligent Coyle finally wanted something other than high grades and a winning baseball season. Coyle, finally, was acting like a normal human being.
So, Coyle was allowed to skip the haircut and that seemed to be the end of it. But a few weeks later Coyle refused to wear the khaki pants Mom laid out for him for school. He put on old, ripped jeans instead and a T-shirt with an emblem of a rooster.
“Collared shirts are for dorks,” Coyle said.
A few days later I heard music coming from the basement. I went down and saw Coyle doing sit-ups on the dichromatic gym mat, listening to my cassette copy of Who’s Next. A while later I heard Coyle lifting weights and listening to Led Zeppelin. No one listened to Led Zeppelin in our house. That was hard rock. It was supposed to be immoral in some undefined way. And it was perfectionist Coyle listening to Led Zeppelin IV. That was just weird.
In school that week I noticed that Coyle had migrated from the center lunch table where the studious kids ate and was now sitting at the edge of the cafeteria with some long-haired kids we called “burnouts.” The burnouts were considered to be the worst kids in the school. They wore concert T-shirts and hung out with girls that had long bangs and wore black eyeliner and smoked cigarettes and talked in bored monotones. “Freaks,” Coyle had called them before. “Loosers.” But now perfect, straight-A-student Coyle was sitting with the burnouts. At one point during the lunch period I even saw him get up and stand on his chair and pretend to be Commander Cornelius from Planet of the Apes, pointing at the popular kids and saying, “Kill the humans!”
A few more weeks passed, and then I was on the back porch when Coyle appeared around the side of the house riding a Honda 125 on-road/off-road motorcycle. I could see right away that it was a used bike, a Frankenstein-type deal, with metal table legs as monkey bars and with a kid’s sparkly banana bicycle seat to sit on. All the paneling and unnecessary framework had been removed. It was light and fast and stripped down and jerry-rigged and there was something undeniably pleasing and just utterly cool about that bike. I was attracted to it immediately.
Our house was the smallest in the neighborhood. We had a long, narrow backyard wedged between larger plots of land with weedy bushes on either side. Coyle rode the bike up into the middle of the yard and came to rest in a patch of dirt that was the pitcher’s mound in our backyard ballgames. I jumped off the porch and walked over.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“Farrelly’s brother is a mechanic. He helped me find the parts and we’ve been putting it together bit by bit. I’m going to ride it to school.”
Dan Farrelly was one of Coyle’s new burnout friends—a skinny kid with straight blond hair, very blue eyes, and a wolfish look. He was the catcher on the baseball team.
“Dad won’t let you ride it,” I said.
“When I’m sixteen he will. It will save them time so they don’t have to drive me around. Until then I can ride it in the backyard and at Deach’s Pit.”
“You have to ride on the roads to get to Deach’s Pit. Dad won’t let you.”
Coyle didn’t bother commenting. He didn’t need my approval to do what he wanted to do. He just revved the engine and I walked around the bike, pretending not to be impressed. Our six-person family lived in a two-bedroom house. All our possessions were communal, including our clothes. Everything was worn out or broken or had lost its luster from overuse. That bike was undeniably the coolest thing that anyone in the family had ever owned. And it was diligent Coyle who had it. I was already thinking of ways of convincing Coyle to let me ride it when I heard the screen door slam and turned to see our father walking out.
Dad had a way of moving when he was angry. The Southside street swagger came out. He didn’t like surprises.
“It’s mine,” Coyle said before Dad even got to him. “I got the frame and the engine from Andy Brands. I’ve been working on it in Farrelly’s garage at night. I’m going to start riding it to school when I turn sixteen so you don’t have to drive me. It will save you time,” Coyle added hopefully.
“You don’t get your license for over two years,” Dad said.
“I can practice before then in the backyard and at Deach’s Pit, where all the other kids ride their dirt bikes.”
“You’re not other kids” was all Dad said. “Get off. Now.”
Coyle knew not to counter Dad directly, particularly when he was in a bad mood. Coyle got off. Dad threw a leg over the bike. He revved the engine a few times, then got off and took the key out and put it in his pocket.
“I need to talk to your mom. Until then, you don’t ride.”
Coyle let out an exasperated puff of air.
“My friends ride at Deach’s Pit every weekend.”
“Yeah, well, those friends are not role models,” Dad said.
That was the first time I heard Dad acknowledge that he knew what was going on with Coyle and his new group of burnout friends.
“I had the same kind of friends growing up,” Dad said. “Smoking. Cutting class. Up to no good. It’s why I moved out of the city. To get away from that. If those guys you’re hanging out with ride motorcycles, it makes me think you shouldn’t do it.”
“You don’t know them,” Coyle said sullenly.
“I can tell what they’re like,” Dad said.
Next door, in Mrs. Chambers’s house, the blinds moved. Seneca, the suburb we lived in, was supposed to be this fancy place. Dad had moved us there so we would have what was supposedly “a better life.” All the houses around us were large and fancy, with red tile roofs and manicured lawns and long curving driveways with multiple expensive cars parked in large garages. Our house didn’t fit in at all. It was small, squat, and redbrick, with dirt patches in the yard. We had one shower for the six of us. When we got in fights they spilled out into the yard and all the neighbors peeked out to see what was going on with the weird, poor family in that rich neighborhood.
Dad ignored Mrs. Chambers. He held the key up to Coyle.
“Is this the only one?”
Coyle grudgingly took another key out of his pocket. He handed it to my father.
“I’ll talk to your mother. Until then this is a lawn ornament,” Dad said.
He walked back to the house.
“Lawn ornament,” Coyle said when Dad was gone. “Where’d he get that one?”
“I knew he wouldn’t let you ride it,” I said.
I reached out for the bike, but hesitated to see what Coyle thought of that. He gave me a skeptical look.
“Don’t even think of touching it,” he said.
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