A Kid from Marlboro Road

The storytellers, the immigrants, and the workers with the lilting voices, the brogues, and the Long Island moxy is all here, told from the perspective of a young boy turning 13 in a 1970s New York Irish-Catholic family.

This coming-of-age novel opens at a wake, as our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, takes in the death of his grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure in his life. The overflowing crowd includes sandhogs in their muddy work boots, old Irish biddies in black dresses and cops in uniform, along with the family in mourning. There's an open casket, the first time he's seen a dead person. Later, at the bar across the street, he tells a story to the assembled crowd about the day his dad proposed to his mom, and how he almost got beat up by her brothers for it, and then how Pop made him propose twice.

His mom calls him "Kneenie," and with her husband and older son Tommy lost to her, he's the best thing she's got. He sees her struggling, but doesn't know how to help--since like his brother and father before him he knows he'll also abandon her soon enough. He writes a poem for class about Jesus, comparing Jesus's words to the flailing and wild branches of a tree in a storm--and wins a prize for it.

Stories cascade between colorful origins in the Bronx in the previous generation and the softer world of the Long Island town of Gibson, where the family lives now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont Race Track, and in Montauk. Out of individual struggles a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American story, raucous and joyous.