BOOK REVIEW
Merullo's "Revere Beach Boulevard" a gripping saga of lost American promise
REVERE BEACH BOULEVARD, by Roland Merullo, Henry Holt, 320 pp., $23.00.
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Nov 22, 1998) -- All across America, there are towns and cities whose stories illuminate our history and values, places where the drama of American life is acted out in bold, sweeping gestures, where the particular stories of groups and individuals mirror the greater realities that hold sway over the land.
Such places have always been fertile territory for the novelist's imagination. One thinks of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Thomas Wolfe's Altamont, Saul Bellow's Chicago and Philip Roth's Newark as territories that, whether real or imagined, are indelibly etched in our consciousness as quintessential symbols of what we mean when we say "America."
Such a place is the Revere of Roland Merullo's "Revere Beach Boulevard," a vividly wrought, tightly plotted, gripping work of imagination and suspense that draws immense power from its narrative verisimilitude and sense of place. Couched in the form of first-person confessions by no fewer than nine different characters, the story ties together disparate threads of animploding subculture plagued by human frailty and forces far beyond anyone's power to contend with.
As in real life, Merullo's Revere, a satellite town outside of Boston, is a traditional ethnic village in decline: a once idyllic, heavily Italian suburban retreat for refugees from the North End, Boston's own Little Italy. Now being torn apart by crime, poverty, the changing mores of its inhabitants and the greater socio-cultural dislocations that afflict all cities of its type, Revere no longer holds out the promise of the American Dream for its young. Indeed, the question of how and whether that dream was ever really fulfilled looms heavily over the broken lives of those who remain there, as does the very nature of that dream to begin with.
In Merullo's Revere, as perhaps in the real one, its core population is increasingly aging while an influx of Asian immigrants rubs up uneasily against the few, forgotten losers who remain, whose inability to break out of Revere is in itself a symptom of some sort of pathology. Says one character who has made it out of Revere and into a life of some success in the big city, "In a way I could not define, Boston was connected in my mind to the rational wide-minded world," implying that Revere is home to the opposite: the closed-minded and the irrational.
Thus, with no center to hold, social relationships are all in flux, and this is where Merullo -- a Revere native who lives in the Pioneer Valley town of Williamsburg and teaches at Bennington (Vt.) College -- so masterfully puts his characters into play. Over the course of four days, a dozen or so representatives of all walks of life in Revere rub up against each other in ways that illuminate so much of what has been lost in their town, but also in ways that raise doubts about the authenticity of nostalgia. As the dying matriarch of the Imbesalacqua clan at the nucleus of the story says, "Good Catholics, and under the surface we're lying, we're keeping secrets, we're loving somebody else besides our wife, we're hating."
Indeed, everyone in Merullo's world harbors a secret, a grudge, a hateful skeleton in a closet. Everyone, that is, except for Peter Imbesalacqua, the protagonist of the novel, whose life is so totally an open book his own mother says of him, "Everybody else's problems are buried so deep nobody sees them, Peter's problems are all in the open."
Peter's immediate problem is the debt he has run up with the local loan shark as a result of his gambling addiction, and the plot centers around how and if Peter will repay that debt. In large part, Merullo's novel is a terrifying portrait of compulsive behavior and the destruction that comes in its wake. Peter's problems become everyone else's problems; his parents, his sister, his half-brother, and, of course, the people to whom he owes money all own a piece of Peter's troubles. His problems sweep everyone into a fiery vortex of implied and actual violence that in the end will shatter all the deceit that overwhelms their lives. By the end, all lies and secrets will be exposed, ironically, through Peter's willful guilelessness.
In lesser hands, the tag-team narrative employed here might have been a clumsy device, but Merullo makes the transitions in point-of-view seamless, in a book that boasts the cinematic sweep and grit of the best work by Richard Price. Moreover, by giving everyone a piece of the narration, Merullo heightens intimacy and gains sympathy for all his characters.
In the end, this is perhaps his greatest achievement. While on the surface, Merullo's is a devastating portrait of a violent, treacherous group of hypocrites, at the same time it is drawn with the sort of depth of understanding and care that only true love could produce. This is an important point: for all their significant flaws, lies, egocentricities and stupidities, Merullo's people are good people, rendered fully human in all their passion and defeat.
The title page of "Revere Beach Boulevard" tells us it is the first volume of a projected "Revere Beach Trilogy." That in itself is reason enough to rejoice. Bring on volume two!
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Nov. 22, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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