Doylestown

Two boys, two bodies, and a town built on secrets.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is a town on the rise. With the train puffing in from Philadelphia and the streets finally paved, optimism is as thick as the mud on Court Street. For thirteen-year-old cousins Alex Henry and Christopher Mathews, scions of the town’s most prominent legal and medical dynasties, the summer is a playground of construction sites and curiosities.

The excitement reaches a fever pitch when the bricks arrive for their fathers’ ambitious new project—a grand building in the heart of town. But the boys’ fascination with the new soon turns to a chilling encounter with the old. After a morning spent exploring “Mercer’s Folly” and a macabre discovery in the woods, they stumble upon something far more haunting than a decayed animal: the body of the wealthy, eccentric Widow Foster, hidden amidst the construction debris of their fathers’ own site.

As the boys recall a heated, late-night argument between their fathers and the widow over missing money, the “sparkling optimism” of Doylestown begins to tarnish. From the bustling town center to the quiet Mennonite farms of Bedminster, Bricks explores the sharp corners of a changing world, where progress and shadows go hand-in-hand.

In a town where everyone is related and every family has a legacy, the truth may be the heaviest brick of all.

This is Thomas Rush’s second novel. He wrote this as part of a self-imposed exercise that he called National Novel Writer’s May (May 2010) in which participants are supposed to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. The novel took 10 days to complete. Using the word National in the title of the exercise was a bit of a misnomer – unless you consider him and his son as a nation onto themselves. Mr. Rush is already hard at work on his third novel (or at least he will be for ten days next November). He lives in Gladwyne, PA with his three children and lovely wife, Meriam, and the most important person in his life – his dog Charlie.