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Stefan Mattessich

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Stefan Mattessich grew up in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his B.A. in comparative literature from Yale College and a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. His dissertation, on the novelist Thomas Pynchon, was published as a monograph entitled LINES OF FLIGHT by Duke University Press. He has worn many hats as a writer: screenwriter, film reviewer, and literary critic as well as fiction writer. His first novel, a coming-of-age story called POINT GUARD, came out from Touchpoint Press in 2017. "On Liberty," the first chapter of EAST BROTHER, appeared as a stand-alone story in the Spring 2017 issue of the Santa Monica Review. A recent publication, the "Angel in the Mango Tree," appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Permafrost Magazine. He teaches English at Santa Monica College and lives in Venice, California.

EAST BROTHER Cover
FICTION & LITERATURE

EAST BROTHER

BY Stefan Mattessich

In Mattessich’s (Point Guard, 2017) novel, a shiftless young Navy seaman goes AWOL and takes refuge with an artist uncle, who’s similarly adrift.

Twenty-something Jess Cooper is a “sweet, rudderless kid” in the Navy. Many of the adults in his life felt that he had “no fire in him…and he had no particular reason to think they were wrong.” The sensitive, artistic young man still seems unsure what to do with his life, but he feels no special urgency to figure it out. However, as a result of a bureaucratic error, he’s presented with an opportunity to escape the Navy’s despotic discipline, so he goes absent without leave while his ship is docked in San Diego. He seeks out his uncle Milo Manning, a “beach bum” who fritters away his days “time surfing, making art…and eking out a livelihood as best as he could.” Milo lives in East Brother, a California beach town that was once a “haven for bohemians and mystics looking for their chance at Shangri-La,” but it’s now overrun by development and new-money millionaires. In fact, Harry Contento, an unscrupulous real estate agent, is relentlessly trying to pry Milo’s property from his hands. It turns out that Milo is just as lost as his nephew is, but he introduces Jess to a “mogul in the making” who has much bigger dreams: “Jack the Cat,” a legendary heroin addict who managed to become the head of a criminal narcotic empire.  Mattessich skillfully constructs an ambient mood of aimlessness in this novel. Along the way, he gets across the extraordinary sense of alienation of those who lack ambition in a careerist age. Jack is an intelligently conceived foil to Jess and Milo, as he’s preternaturally motivated and always ready to leap headlong into new and uncertain experiences. Jess is neither dumb nor lazy, but he is irremediably average; indeed, his ordinariness seems to be the source of his decency and his despair, and the author depicts this conundrum with impressive subtlety. Milo, meanwhile, is shown to be caught between the bliss of freedom and the onerous weight of purposelessness, and Mattessich thoughtfully and poetically captures his predicament: “Life surrounds him, root and branch, in tendrils of smilax and the snares that spiders weave. It turns in circles of awesome fecundity. But he senses its remoteness, too, like a humming you hear only as the susurration of blood in veins.” Mattessich is at his best when he plumbs the depths of his characters’ brokenness and limns the elusiveness of redemption: “[Milo] doesn't know where he stands anymore, or if there is even any place to stand. That margin has become a surface, and it flattens out a little more each day, robbing him of a vital third dimension.” Overall, this novel offers readers an unflinchingly realistic and achingly sad depiction of a profound lonesomeness—one that can’t be remedied by company but, at the same time, isn’t completely hopeless, either.

A heartbreaking and delicately composed story about the pain of ennui.

Pub Date:

ISBN: 978-0-578-57261-1

Page count: 231pp

Publisher: Urizen Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

Awards, Press & Interests

Day job

Professor

Favorite author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Favorite book

Love in the Time of Cholera

Hometown

Venice Beach

ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE

Point Guard

Seventeen-year-old Woody and his friends encounter dead ends in Mendocino, a town on the Northern California coast. So does basketball coach Ray Ellis, an ex-All American with a dark past. Everything changes when sophisticated city kid Chase McMillan shows up, inspiring in them all the confidence and self-respect they need to face the future. But as Chase introduces a new competitive spirit both on and off the court, those dead ends close in on his new friends, and Ray’s dark past catches up with him, Woody tragically discovers at what cost success can come.
Published: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 97819469201126
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