This intensely nostalgic debut novel from film-maker Edward Burns, best known for writing and directing The Brothers McMullen, begins with a well-attended wake in 1970s New York. At the service, “old Irish biddies dressed in black” pray over their rosary beads; afterwards, drinking buddies of the deceased, a labourer named Pop McSweeney, trade stories at the bar.
Then the narrator, Pop’s young grandson, introduces us to his Long Island home turf where many of the neighbours – O’Neils, Murphys, Dillons – have double-digit families. His dad loves to “play the ponies”; his mother suffers bouts of melancholy. He attends a Catholic school called St Joes run by sadistic nuns. If there’s a more Irish-American novel published this year, it’ll be something to behold.
The narrator remains nameless but his background is markedly similar to the author’s own – indeed, photos from the Burns family album crop up at the back showing forebears who inspired some of the characters in the book. As well as Pop, there’s a paternal great-grandfather who started a trucking company in Hell’s Kitchen, and his abusive drunk of a son who was gunned down outside a tavern on 11th Avenue – the narrator’s father visits the spot every year with his kids to raise a celebratory glass.
There is a keenly felt sense in the novel, which may have prompted its writing, of the past fading away or being demolished. The narrator’s mother gets a sadness in her eyes whenever she passes a monument of her youth that’s fallen into disrepair. She’s even more upset by the prospect of losing her two sons to adulthood. The narrator’s older brother, Tommy, turned into an “asshole” when he became a teenager – surly, delinquent, dismissive of his family. Now as the narrator turns 13, he worries he’ll go the same way.
Before this dreaded transformation occurs – and there are twinges of it whenever his mother holds his hand in the street or his dad tries to foist Hemingway on him – he sets about documenting his life using a typewriter inherited from his grandfather. He records recent fishing trips and neighbourhood baseball games alongside older childhood memories and family anecdotes going back decades. The layers of nostalgia threaten to become overbearing at times but Burns’s plain, unfussy style keeps a lid on it. We’re left with a vivid snapshot of a time that’s already receding into the distant past – a tender-hearted complement to the Irish-American stories that Burns captures in his films.
A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns is published by Seven Stories (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
