“A Kid From Marlboro Road”
Edward Burns
Seven Stories Press, $27.95
It feels like Edward Burns began "A Kid From Marlboro Road" as a memoir, but like any good Irish storyteller with a lively imagination he got carried away. And pretty soon it was, well, just a good, embellished yarn.
It was, in fact, the other way around.
The screenwriter, actor, and movie producer had begun a novel during the Covid pandemic about a group of kids growing up in western Long Island, Mr. Burns explained in a recent essay about the book. He was also having daily phone conversations with his mother during which she eventually began sharing stories about her life and their family. Those stories, and others he had been told growing up, would form the central narrative and feeling of the novel.
"What I didn't anticipate is that those trips down memory lane would shape and transform the novel I was writing," Mr. Burns wrote for the bookseller Barnes & Noble.
There are enough parallels between the book and his real life that it became something of a tribute to his immigrant Irish (and a touch of Swedish) family. The slim volume concludes with eight pages of family photographs dating back a century to the first generation's arrival in America.
"A Kid From Marlboro Road" is 12-year-old Kneeney's account of the complicated, beautiful, and heartbreaking year leading up to his 13th birthday. It describes an awakening to the confusion and sweetness and sadness of life, and the strength and clarity that come with that.
Hidden in here is the story of how a kid becomes a writer. The year is 1980. Kneeney lives with his mother and father and his thuggish older brother in the working-class community of Gibson (part of Valley Stream, where Mr. Burns himself grew up). His dad is a cop, his mother works at J.F.K. She wanted more out of life, his dad — "I'm working so many hours chasing bad guys so that you can go to college" — is doing his best.
In a crushing scene at a bar in the city, young Kneeney, stunned, overhears his mother in a conversation with another cop's wife: "It's not the life a young girl dreams of, is it? . . . Just making ends meet, a civil servant's wife, living paycheck to paycheck."
What is she talking about, Kneeney wonders. Sure, the family drives an old "shit mobile," and they eat cheap "no brand" cereal and cookies and none of his friends' parents went to college. But he likes his life, which he observes keenly. Catching doormat-size fluke with his dad in the bays and canals around New York, playing ball in the street with his friends, listening to the Rolling Stones in his basement, noticing how the majestic maples on their street turn orange and yellow in the fall.
But for reasons that Kneeney can't clearly grasp, suddenly something is happening, nothing is that simple anymore. On a trip into the city, peering into the windows at Tiffany and looking at the towering, upscale buildings overlooking Central Park, he realizes how out of reach much of the world is.
And for the first time, he picks up tension, disappointment, between his parents. At some point — he can't remember when — they stopped laughing together.
Edward Burns Family Photo
The novel plays out in dozens of stories of outings with his mother and father and accounts of his big Irish family's history — the drunks, the one great family success who was known as a "pioneer" because he promised never to drink, and the many friends and relatives who made their way in America, some of them digging the tunnels and cutting the stone for the bridges into Manhattan, prompting young Kneeney to decide then and there he'd never do any of that kind of work.
Mr. Burns writes in a facile, descriptive stream, often in run-on sentences. As with any good Irish storyteller, one moment you're laughing, the next it's reflective, deadly serious.
When Kneeney's brother, Tommy, gets busted for stealing a Penthouse from the local candy store, their dad puts both of them in the local jail to teach them a lesson. Not much of one, as it turns out. In there that day with them are two hookers.
"They were actually really funny. And sweet too. And one of them showed Tommy her boobs."
"Ironic, ain't it," Tommy comments, that his punishment "for stealing a nudie mag was getting to see the real thing. . . ."
There's a poignant scene in Montauk (Mr. Burns and his family have a house in East Hampton), where the family is camping and fishing. Kneeney hitches a ride with a longhaired surfer and his girlfriend, ages 20 and 19. The surfer calls the city "the Big Apple." Who does that? They pull over, giggling, happy, stoned, and kissing, so enraptured they forget Kneeney is in the back seat. They're the age of his parents when they married, which seems impossible. They're too bafflingly carefree, they can't keep their hands off each other. How could they be adults who could get married and have kids?
Kneeney's central struggle that year is with his heart. It's waking up. Kneeney never says this. He just shows it.
Christopher Cross's melancholy song "Sailing," about escaping teenage angst, is always on the radio that summer, and Kneeney and his mother both love it. Which brands him a "pussy" in his brother's eyes.
Kneeney, swept away by a Rolling Stones album, one day finds himself sitting in the basement listening to "As Tears Go By" with his mom, who breaks into tears: "What are you going to say when your mom is crying to a Rolling Stones song?"
When he wins a poetry contest at school for comparing Jesus to the maple tree outside his window, the neighborhood kids, upon seeing the poem in the church bulletin, sting him with nicknames: Shakesqueer and Walt Dickman. But his parents shower him with gifts — a typewriter, books by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Eugene O'Neill — to encourage his writing.
Kneeney was just trying to finish a lame assignment with a poem that might get him a B-minus if he's lucky.
"It just needed to sound good and give you a feeling, which I think it did," he says.
Which pretty much captures "A Kid From Marlboro Road."
Biddle Duke, a regular contributor to The Star, lives in Springs.