Revere Beach elegy : a memoir of home and beyond / Roland Merullo

In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, to begin an intricate, impressionistic portrait of his rich and complex life. The tough codes of Revere's working-class streets mix with the warmth and affirmation of family -- forty cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles -- to form a background against which Merullo's later wanderings are always set. In one of the most indelible portraits in American literature by a son, Merullo writes of his first-generation Italian-American father, a man whose drive and pride serve as both lasting inspiration and crucible for his oldest son. Merullo is plucked from the Revere public schools to become a scholarship boy at St. John's Prep, then the elite Exeter Academy, where his trajectory toward "something softer and richer, something said to resemble success" has its shaky beginning. After graduating from the Ivy League, Merullo travels to the USSR, and there, in his encounters with two Russian friends, he witnesses a kind of loyalty and grit that even Revere hadn't shown him. He serves in the Peace Corps as a volunteer on a tiny atoll in Micronesia, where the onset of a tropical illness is no more of a plague than his gnawing sense of ineptitude and failure. Back in America, he works as a Boston cabbie, falls in love, and sinks toward poverty as he pursues his dream of publishing a novel. Years later, having published three novels and settled in rural western Massachusetts, Merullo travels to Italy with his wife, mother, and young daughter. There, the difficulties of travel vanish for a moment in a taste of the sacred; long-lost parts of his heritage and simple encounters with human generosity cross lines of nationality and class and resolve themselves into flashes of pure grace. Together, these episodes form a daring and heartrending spiritual autobiography, one in which place, class, and family are as critical as prayer. Book jacket.