Edward Burns
A Kid from Marlboro Road
Seven Stories Press / August 2024 / 220 pp / $27.95
Reviewed by Lisa McCormack / December 2024
Family stories told by an Irish Catholic boy growing up on Long Island in the 1970s drive the narrative of A Kid from Marlboro Road, a coming-of-age debut novel from actor and filmmaker Edward Burns. It’s old-fashioned Irish storytelling at its best, narrated by a sensitive and perceptive twelve-year-old boy who wants to be a writer and is acutely aware of the changing world around him.
The novel brings to life the boy’s police officer father who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a brooding mother who longs for the past, and a brother who seems intent on trouble. There is a grandfather who was shot and killed in front of a tavern; Pops, another grandfather with a colorful past; and a great-grandfather called “The Big Guy,” who gave the family their love of fishing and beaches.
The narrator tells us how life feels for him as he contemplates the death of his grandfather, the knowledge that his parents don’t get along as well as they used to, and the bittersweet taste of change, which permeates the novel. The boy describes the changing world through a mix of old stories his parents and grandparents have told him, along with his own observations, experienced first-hand with while living on Marlboro Road in Griffin, Long Island, in a house built in the 1920s.
The characters are so lifelike and the settings so vivid it sometimes feels the book is a memoir rather than fiction. There are even family photos in the back. The jacket copy, however, says “novel.” No matter if it’s fact or fiction, the stories here represent Irish humor and melancholy, some rollicking characters, and deep love of family. The book opens at a wake for Pops, after which he is described as a “happy drunk, not an angry drunk” as friends and family gather to celebrate his life.
When my mom was little Pop McSweeney would get his paycheck and take my mom with him on the subway . . . They would then walk over to Third Avenue and go into every Irish bar on the street, where Pops would have a beer, talk to friends, sing a song and make my mom sit on top of the bar and wait for him.
The narrator describes how his father took him every year to a tavern in Hell’s Kitchen where an old bartender, referred to as O’D, recounted the story of how the boy’s grandfather was shot outside the tavern by a loan shark to whom he owed money.
After telling the part about watching the five bullets rip through my grandfather’s chest and the blood spraying onto the window of the bar, O’D then tells us how he quickly kicked everybody out of the joint, locked the door and shut the lights.
The stories are shared by the narrator, as they had been told to him, because his parents “loved old stories.” We hear about his father’s childhood as an altar boy, his mother’s reminiscing about the “old” Penn Station, which was torn down when she was in her twenties, and stories from the narrator’s Swedish grandmother, who came to New York through Ellis Island, worked as a laundress for a wealthy New York family, and has this to say:
I was here before running water. Before the car, before the plane before the rockets to the moon, before the two World Wars and all that death. I was here before the radio and the record player and the movies and the TV, when the only thing you could do to keep yourself entertained was to read and think, and of course, tell stories.
Our narrator embraces all the stories with deep love and affection for his family. He feels close to his mother and keenly aware of a growing sadness in her. He talks about the “normal sadness,” when she wishes life were more like it was when she was young. But there is another kind of sadness he remembers that started when Pops died. His father says that sadness is “just the Irish in her.”
The mother’s sadness brings a longing for how things used to be. There is nostalgia in her voice, as well as the narrator’s, when she describes visiting Rockaway Beach, Montauk, and Hell’s Kitchen. There is nostalgia in the father’s voice as he recalls when LaGuardia was “still a sleepy little airport.” The narrator wrestles with feelings about changes that have taken place in his own short life—things that don’t happen anymore, like walking with his father in Bay Park and watching the fishermen and listening with his mother to Jean Shepard on the radio.
The novel reflects an Irish Catholic childhood from the perspective of a boy who examines everything with love and longing. Burns’s characters are outlandish, charming, and fun, yet emotional, heavy-hearted, and full of empathy—exactly what we expect from good, old-fashioned Irish storytelling.
Lisa McCormack is an alum of the Naslund-Mann MFA program at Spalding University. She is an aspiring novelist and short story writer from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. Her fiction has appeared in Swing magazine, Third Wednesday, and Still: The Journal.