A teenage boy struggling with the coming-of-age issues of sexuality, religion, and peer approval is overwhelmed, but soldiers on. After several years, he comes to understand the family forces that have left him so deeply troubled, and the process of healing begins.
As a child growing up in various cities and towns, Britt Rutgers exhibits both acute sensitivity and an insatiable ebullience that expresses itself in rebelliousness against his restrictive parents. But something profoundly important is missing deep inside. As he moves into his late teens in the 1950s on a farm near Mayfield, Iowa, his enthusiasm gradually morphs into agonizing self-consciousness, feelings of guilt, embarrassment over sexual naïveté, and fear wrought by his fundamentalist religious upbringing. His parents have always worshipped the ground that his quietly serious older brother walked on, and Britt begins to emulate him. Battling these internal demons, Britt is unable to concentrate and becomes panicky that he will fail his school subjects.
In his senior year in high school, Britt spends an evening bowling with his buddies. Something happens on that fateful Saturday night, and he is about to enter a world of terror.
Breaking Out explores a family's dynamics and history, revealing the forces that shape a child and make a train wreck of his crossing from adolescence into childhood.
Excerpt
Slowly the men rose and shuffled off to their rooms. Britt likewise complied, changed into his pajamas and crawled into bed. But for the first time in the ten days he’d been at Woodside, he couldn’t get to sleep. He imagined what he looked like during the ECTs as the electricity made him shake uncontrollably and bite hard on the piece of wood. He was frightened. Gloria had been doing something with the oxygen tank when he woke up the last time. Did they have to use it on him? And what if they had to and it didn’t work? Could a person get epilepsy from the treatments? Was this good for his brains? Didn’t people who got hit by lightning sometimes have brain damage? Yes, but lightning was a lot more powerful than these ECTs. Still, why wouldn’t they at least cause a little damage? And it would add up with each one. What if something went wrong with the machine and too much electricity went into his brain and it killed him? Holy Moses! Yeah, what if something went wrong? Or what if all that convulsing caused him to have a heart attack? Had it ever happened? Had anybody ever been killed?
Britt was becoming panicky. He had to know the answers to these questions.
Professional Reviews Midwest Book Review. Quite the story of coming of age and coming of life, very highly recommended.
From a tough road, one can still excel far and beyond what's expected of them. "Breaking Out" tells the story of troubled youth Britt Rutgers who struggles to find his place in life and face the demons that a life of fundamental Christianity, the problems of teen life, and the need to succeed crushed him under. "Breaking Out" is quite the story of coming of age and coming of life, very highly recommended.
Breaking Out a moving portrait of adolescent despair
FLORIDA WRITERS
philJASON
This is a noteworthy first novel, although it too often reads more like a case study or third-person autobiography. The reader is asked to attend to so many details, seemingly of equal importance, that control over emphasis suffers. Very minor characters are introduced as if readers had better get to know them, but this turns out not to be the case. They quickly leave the scene and the novel. Often, scenes that merit only summary presentation are elaborately dramatized.
And yet “Breaking Out” is powerful and deals with important issues. It is powerful in that Bob Brink’s writing style is clear and attractive. His sentences and paragraphs are well turned. His descriptions of persons and places are vivid and insightful. Thus, while larger structural elements are problematic, his evocative prose has polish and grace.
The important thematic issues have to do with diagnosing and treating potentially dangerous neurotic behavior and understanding the nature and consequences of parenting that is psychologically debilitating.
We first meet the main character, Britt Rutgers, when he is a high school student in the 1950s. Mr. Brink efficiently paints a telling scene about Britt’s extreme self-consciousness and sensitivity. Britt can barely bring himself to cross the crowded gymnasium of the Mayfield (Iowa) High School to take an available seat.
He imagines that all of the students crowded into the bleacher seats will be staring at him, and the feeling of exposure and scrutiny is unbearable. He is almost paralyzed.
We learn, as well, that Britt is sexually naïve and doesn’t even know the everyday language of sexuality that is constantly on the lips of his classmates.
From here, the author moves backward and forward in time, providing the causes of Britt’s painful self-awareness, innocence, and lack of confidence — as well as the later consequences of those causal factors.
The Rutgers household is a stern and emotionally cold environment. Informed by the fundamentalist Calvinist theology and discipline of the region’s strict Dutch Reformed Church, it is an environment with a strong work ethic and a strong sense of sin. Milton and Miriam Rutgers, Britt’s parents, seem incapable of healthy nurturing. Britt’s personality presents them with issues they can’t handle, but they have magnified his sense of worthlessness by offering only rejection while doing all they can to encourage and support the endeavors of their fairly ordinary oldest son, Kevin.
The parents never quite figure out that words of kindness, approval, and respect would do Britt far more good than their willingness to support psychological and psychiatric treatment, treatment that involves two periods of extended institutionalization and a regimen of shock therapy.
Electroconvulsive Therapy (or ECT) always has been and remains a controversial treatment. Through Britt’s experience, Bob Brink examines its efficacy and the question of the circumstances under which it is likely to be beneficial. Of course, if a patient is misdiagnosed in the first place, there is a good chance that such a course of action will be inappropriate and even dangerous. ETC reduced Britt’s hyper-sensitivity, but it also had a kind of dulling, numbing effect.
The backgrounds of Milton Rutgers and his wife are given significant elaboration in “Breaking Out.” Our understanding of Milton’s behavior toward Britt is especially sharpened by author Brink’s exploration of Milton’s own upbringing in the larger context of the Rutgers family.
Indeed, Bob Brink’s probing of the dynamics of family life and of the interplay between nature and nurture gives “Breaking Out” relevance for just about any reader. His particular focus on the difficulties of the transition from adolescence to adulthood, severely complicated in the case of Britt Rutgers, should also give the book wide appeal.
In its latter stages, “Breaking Out” takes us through Britt’s college years, his early adult life, his career, and continuing difficulties with intimacy that handicap his marriages. However, Britt struggles on and eventually comes to see his life, though plagued by cruel challenges, as meaningful and fulfilling. Britt’s resilience makes “Breaking Out,” which so often (and so effectively) describes deep psychological suffering, an uplifting achievement.
Author Bob Brink, who has had a long career as a journalist, feature writer, and editor, lives just outside of West Palm Beach in Palm Springs.
Deb Fowler, Feathered Quill Book Reviews
The plight of a young, frightfully insecure young man, Britt Rutgers, is
brought to life in a raw, powerful way that can only be found in real life, in the mental institutions of yesteryear.
This is a stunning, yet subtle exposé of what one young man had to endure at the hands of psychiatry instead of coming of age on his own terms ... The style and the tone of this novel capture the essence of the era with aplomb, a commendable feat given the difficulty of the topic.
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