"The ridge slopes downward, taking me past a massive brownstone church and house of the late William Carlos Williams where Ridge Road meets Park Avenue, a long boulevard of shops and storefronts from 1900, 1920, 1940, of every style worked and reworked to one cohesive main street distinctively Rutherford in character."
So reads West of 16W, a novel recently published by Rutherford native Mark Slomiany based on his return to the town where he grew up after years away. The novel is about a young man and his friends living on the edge of great changes, trying to balance their hopes for creative endeavor with the necessity of work and their careers. The main character, Mark, travels home to Rutherford for the first time in years and then in the tradition of On the Road sets out on a trip across the country seeking the self-knowledge to help him maintain his artistic aspirations in the face of work and settling down.
"Part of the concept of the book is the conflict between aspirations and settling down," he says. "Especially when you're in your 20s… caught between the obligations of family and the obligations of future family." The son of Polish immigrants, Slomiany grew up on Ridge Road in Rutherford and attended Rutherford High School. His parents, who still live there today, are both biochemists at Rutgers. At the age of 18, he traveled to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to attend college at Washing and Lee University.
"It was as far away from New York as you possibly could get," he says of the small Southern town where he went to college. "It's almost like a sound was missing, like people who live near a waterfall. There's just this vibration to the [New York] area."
After graduating college, he attended medical school at the University of South Carolina in Charleston where he eventually received his doctorate and is now an assistant professor of biology researching therapies that target clusters of cancer cells that are resistant to chemotherapy.
However, throughout his advancement in science, Slomiany had dreams of becoming a writer. He took creative writing classes in college, helped edit and run student literary magazines and wrote short pieces. But biology was his primary work and he had never gotten a chance to write a full novel.
So after he completed his dissertation and before he began his job at the university, Slomiany took advantage of the month and a half in between to return home. He sought to use his time both home and traveling across the country as inspiration.
"Coming home at Christmas is different," he says. "When you come home for an extended period of time you get into deeper conversations with your friends." Friends and family who he had only seen in the midst of the bustle and energy of the holidays were different during the summer when life's routines were their primary occupation.
"It was a weird time, when people were still living there before they got married or moved away," says Slomiany. He and most of his friends were just on the cusp of major changes.
The visit offered him insight into how both he and his home had changed while he had been away. What had once been inevitable and unremarkable about his home suddenly took on its own distinct reality. He could hear accents where he previously heard none and catch glimpses of his town the way it would look to someone who hadn't lived there.
Furthermore, his visit was after Sept. 11, a seminal event in the life of his home region that he had been away for, and during the summer preceding the 2004 elections, when New York was in the midst of anticipating the upcoming Republican convention. Something as ordinary as traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel to go into the city had become occasion to see Humvees with mounted machine guns on the roof.
Shortly after Slomiany set out on a trip around the country. He got a Greyhound bus pass, allowing him unlimited travel on any line for a limited amount of time, and set out across the country, traveling from New York to Chicago, St. Louis, Denver and even all the way to San Francisco and Portland before heading home.
"It was the first time I'd traveled extensively in the U.S.," he said. Afterwards, Slomiany returned to Charleston where he worked in the labs by day and worked on his novel by night, eventually completing a draft by the end of 2004. Two of his major inspirations were William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac, whose work and locality both echoed his own home and ambitions. Williams in particular was inspirational as a fellow doctor and writer.
The format of Kerouac's On the Road and the focus on place of Williams' works such as Paterson influenced Slomiany. "With this book I really wanted to capture the places where I was," he said.
The book was just released in March. It's available as an e-book or on various online sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
