So begins the tale of an obsessive partnership, an act of construction and reconciliation – a bridge across a river and a span across shared grief.
The brothers are incensed, but one of them, Clay, agrees to drop out of high school and work on this labor in the wilderness. He wants to know whether any of them will help build a bridge in the old-fashioned style, by hand, without mortar. “Bridge of Clay” opens several years after that tragedy when their errant father returns for a brief visit. “What we were,” Matthew says, “there’s nothing left.” The boys refer to him, when they speak of him at all, as the murderer – the man who killed them. Their shattered father wandered off for good. These kids lost their mother, Penelope, after a three-year battle with cancer. But just below the surface of all that adolescent male vitality run crosscurrents of anger and misery. Zusak pours unbridled joy and chaotic violence into this house with its scrum of boys. “We swore like bastards, fought like contenders, and punished each other.” Their house ripens into “a porridge of mess and fighting,” something between a locker room and a barnyard, where a mule has free rein of the kitchen. The narrator, Matthew, is just old enough to act as his brothers’ guardian in a town that expresses little concern for the well-being of these abandoned boys. The story – a full-throated paean to sibling affection – is about five brothers raising themselves as best they can. Such perseverance is awe-inspiring but risky, for all the reasons this new novel makes plain. Markus Zusak, the phenomenally popular Australian writer, worked on “Bridge of Clay” for two decades, essentially his whole adult life.
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