“Book Thief” author’s newest demands patience

FICTION Book of Clay

By Markus Zusak (Knopf )

Imagine five young brothers — a mother who is dead and a father who has departed — sharing a home, trying to find their way through life, with beers cooling in the fridge, a weighty secret, and a mule that regularly inhabits the kitchen.

These are the Dunbar boys, whose sweeping story is told in Markus Zusak’s longawaited novel, “Bridge of Clay,” a 500page emotional rollercoaster.

The boys create their own pain to relieve the hurt of abandonment, but none more so than Clay, the next to youngest Dunbar, who runs to escape, who is in constant training for some undefinable future event. When his father returns years later, Clay is the only brother willing to reconnect with him, ostensibly to help build a bridge over a river, but clearly, to create something great from darkness, to reunite the family.

Each of the boys is endearing in his own way: Henry, the entrepreneur, taking bets on how fast Clay can navigate a gauntlet of weeds and glass and humankind; Rory, who favors beer over books and has a habit of dragging home mailboxes; Tommy, the baby, who seeks solace in an unlikely menagerie of pets; Matthew, who leaves school to find a job and digs up a typewriter buried in a backyard to immortalize their lives; and Clay, the smiling, quiet one, who pushes secrets and his pain inward.

Together, the five are a raucous, violent bunch, fists flying, blood streaming, bodies rolling on the ground, followed by ice buckets, sore cuts and scrapes, purple bruises and halfhearted attempts to patch it all up. “It’s a mystery, even to me sometimes, how boys and brothers love,” says Matthew, the eldest brother and narrator.

Zusak’s singular writing style can be brilliant, his descriptions spare but searing. We are introduced to Penelope, the boys’ mother, as she grows up in Eastern Europe, learning to play the piano with her father, “the statue of Stalin,” by her side. “Just once she’d have loved to see him erupt — to slap his thigh, or tear at this aging thicket of hair. He never did. He only brought in a branch of spruce tree and whipped her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped or she made another mistake. One winter’s morning, when she was still just a pale and timidbacked child, she got it twentyseven times, for twentyseven musical sins.”

Penelope plucks out tenderness from the boys, especially as they witness her decline, and so does Carey, the girl next door whom Clay instantly loves and lets in.

The book is packed with metaphors and references to Greek mythology and Michelangelo: the lopsidedfaced mule is named Achilles, and the fat, furry cat, Hector. Artifacts play crucial roles in the tale, including Penelope’s piano and what it holds within and without.

Zusak leads the reader through the family’s “ramshackle tragedy” in a deliberate, innovative way, slowly pushing up to a crest, then careening downward again and again, the chapter endings eliciting laughs, puzzlement or tears. He leaves cryptic clues along the way, only baring their meaning many chapters later.

This is a novel that requires time, patience and attention — just like the Dunbar boys, just like Clay’s bridge — to reap the inevitable reward.