With the 2012 publication of his humorous, insightful, and sympathetic short story collection The Incurables, Mark Brazaitis long ago established himself as one of the most necessary writers of American fiction. It is no surprise then that, fast forward twelve years, his novel American Seasons boldly and fearlessly explores the territories of America’s painful history with race and politics. Eerily enough, the book’s focus on America’s continued dance with white supremacy in conservative and Southern areas of the United States resonates quite loudly with the ever-volatile right-wing political base fueled by Donald Trump’s vehement rhetoric toward minorities, immigrants, and refugees.
American Seasons follows young Tom Kennedy, an aspiring sportswriter who follows a small college’s basketball team through their highs and lows both on and off the court. Tom navigates the follies of a different era’s expectations: a young Catholic, he is torn between his burning desire for the basketball coach’s wife and his fiancée, Priscilla. Meanwhile, Tom must also navigate the seemingly unachievable expectations set forth by his faith and a society defined by toxic masculinity and misogyny. Amidst all the personal turmoil Tom endures, he must also confront racism and homophobia in all its forms during a time when America could elect a Catholic president, but it still could not fathom the idea of a black basketball player being successful on and off the basketball court. Thus, with a magic that only a fiction master like Mark Brazaitis can weave, all of these simmering narratives blend and blur to create a deeply gripping, psychological novel perfect for the months leading up to the November 2024 Presidential elections.
Part of the novel’s majesty lies in its portrayal of individual characters, which ultimately serve as microcosms of America’s larger ethnic, psychological, and cultural make-up for a Kennedy-era America. Tadas, the towering and quick-to-anger Lithuanian who narrowly escaped communism’s grips, leaves a lasting impression on readers. He may very well serve as the novel’s representative of the psychological and emotional trauma that accompanies immigrants to their new homelands and then plagues the generations that come after. Vince, the angsty and closeted homosexual, turns violent and malicious as his lack of self-esteem and relentless pursuit of approval pushes him to depression’s brinks. Darrell, the Black star basketball player is the novel’s tragic hero, whose future is demolished in an instant due to Vince’s maliciousness, and, meanwhile, young Tom bears witness to it all as the reliable narrator to an America that few want to acknowledge even existed.
At the novel’s heart, however, is a clinical examination of how white supremacy became an integral section of America’s socio-cultural fabrication. After Darrell leads his small college’s team to a major victory, Vince’s resentment towards him grows, and Vince decides to prank Darrell by taking him to a Ku Klux Klan rally. Vince’s actions are the embodiment of what academic Donald Yacovone refers to as the values “to be treasured by rising generations of Americans” that were passed on “generation to generation,” predominantly through America’s whitewashed education curriculum. Whiteness, as Yocovone discusses, was a “national inheritance, a way to preserve the social construction of American life, and, ironically, its democratic institutions and values.” In Vince’s character, the ideas of white superiority and Black inferiority long perpetuated by American society culminate and form Vince’s jealousy.
More startling, however, is how American Seasons examines individual and societal complicity in white supremacy. Predominantly, readers see this develop via Tom’s self-awareness as well as his awareness about the society in which he exists. Tom recognizes that in America, “the most elegantly dressed black person might be unwelcome in even the most disreputable bar, restaurant, or rent-by-the-hour hovel.” It is a powerful observation that nonetheless reminds readers that such instances still occur in modern America: one only has to look at such incidences as the 2020 Ouzo Bay incident in Baltimore in which an African American woman and her young son were denied entry into the restaurant due to a “dress code violation.” Tom also recognizes his own complicity in such incidences, including Darrell’s death: “Most Americans did what I did, which is to say they did nothing.” With this single statement, Tom implores readers to examine their own actions and responses during times where advocacy and solidarity—not passivity and division—are required.
Of course, unlike the potentially irreversible course of political disaster on which America currently travels as it veers towards a second Trump presidency, American Seasons offers readers a glimmer of redemption—and individual and collective hope. Again, it is Tom who—after a lifetime of professional, personal, and financial mistakes— attempts to right the personal and historical wrongs that set his painful course in life decades ago by telling the basketball team’s true story. Tom’s actions are a call to action for readers to once again look inside themselves and discover what they can do to empower, rather than oppress or silence, others and that it is never too late pursue forgiveness.
American Seasons is a novel for today’s America—one that should be required reading. Fast-paced and enthralling, it captures one of the most thrilling—and terrifying—times in America’s history, and Brazaitis’s writing lures readers into a gone-by era’s values and rhetoric still defining America’s socio-political composition today.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.