Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak (review)

The five Dunbar boys put the rough in their rough-and-tumble coming of Aussie age in a small house situated near a field full of abandoned junk and bordering a horseracing track. Matthew, the eldest, tells the tale of his family, beginning with his retrieval of his grandmother's typewriter and the bones of his father's dog and the snake that killed it from where his father buried them. Alternating between their present as boys abandoned by their father after their mother Penelope's death and the stories Penelope shared with his brother Clay, Matthew artfully recounts tales of Penelope's childhood behind the Iron Curtain and her move to Australia where she eventually meets and marries Michael Dunbar, a man carrying the grief of a failed first marriage. When three of their five sons are in their teens, Penelope begins an agonizing three-year journey toward death from cancer that leaves each boy ravaged in his own way. Clay is affected most of all, and Matthew's tale centers on him, though each brother's personality is given loving attention; the Dunbar boys fight as hard as they love, which is very hard indeed. The intergenerational story spools out slowly and in pieces, some of it in a nearly indecipherable code of private memories and Down Under horse racing jargon, but most of it compellingly beautiful and rendered in rhetorical and structural homage to Penelope's favorite epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, with an ethos that calls to mind Hinton's The Outsiders. The timeline is sometimes difficult to track, but for readers who can appreciate a lengthy work that is at times more art than story, a readerly treasure of deep love for the boyishness of boys and the wonder of brothers unfolds to a conclusion that is as devastating as it is healing. KC