Revere Beach Elegy

In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, a place, five miles from Boston, where the affirmation of family—fifty cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles that are more like mothers and fathers—and the tough codes of his gritty working-class neighborhood form an insular world almost impossible to leave.

In one of the most indelible essays in American literature by a son about his father, Merullo writes of his second-generation Italian-American father, a man whose drive and pride are a crucible for his oldest son. He tells the story of being plucked from McKinley Junior High School to become a scholarship boy at the elite Exeter Academy, where his trajectory toward "something softer and richer, something said to resemble success" begins, shakily.

His later travels—to the former USSR, to Micronesia as a Peace Corps volunteer, and eventually to Italy, where the annoyances of family travel resolve themselves, for a moment, into a taste of the sacred—compose pieces of what is in the end a daring and heartrending spiritual autobiography, one in which place and class are as critical as prayer.