It took something really big to tear me away from The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert Gross.  And the big thing was the release of Paradise Atop The Hudson by Sammy Juliano.  Fascinating as I find the world Gross writes about – Concord MA in the 19th century, the world Sammy writes about fascinates me even more – Fairview NJ in the Sixties.  It happens that Fairview is one of the most common names for a town in the United States so to make it real clear we are referring to 07022 in Bergen county nestled between North Bergen, Cliffside Park and Ridgefield.

Unlike most people who grew up in Fairview in the Sixties, author Sammy Juliano stayed there.  He has spent 37 years teaching things like English, literature, creative writing and American history in Fairview public schools, which only go up to the ninth grade, something that will be explained in PATH. He was born in 1954 and I was born in 1952 and we lived perhaps a quarter mile from one another but our paths never seemed to cross. PATH gave me some insight into that phenomenon.

Opening

First of all PATH is a coming of age novel about a sensitive kid. Adam Furano is kind and generous – to a fault. It is also a homage to a time and place as is indicated by its brilliant opening line.

September 1971 “Hey, I’ll trade you a Round-Up for a frozen custard”,

The novel opens in the waning days of the famed Palisades Amusement Park.

The proposed trade refers to strips of free tickets that circulated among school kids who lived near the park. The tickets were to the less expensive rides in the park along with a frozen custard cone. The proposed trade serves to introduce us to the generous Adam who gives his friend and nemesis Jimbo two custards and does not accept a Round-Up in return.  We learn that Adam is the grandchild of immigrants from Italy on his father’s side and Ireland on his mother’s side.

With wavy jet-black hair like his father, but with blue eyes, soft facial features and a light complexion like his mother, the delicate, good-looking boy, five feet seven in height and 125 pounds, was a ball of positive energy who championed music, movies, and sports. But nothing meant more to him than the blissfulness of his family, friends and all the people in his life.

The evening in the park will end in Chapter 2 with a tragic accident that will keep us in suspense for more than 30 chapters. Chapter 3 opens in March 1961 with the seven year old Adam visiting his Irish grandmother.

The Plot

The novel is a coming of age story.  There is a lot of focus on Adam’s relationship with his mother and grandmother.  There is tension between his parents created by his mother’s fierce attachment to her son who does not live up to his father’s concept of manliness.  The overriding story though is about Adam’s relations with bullies who persecute him.  His “turn the other cheek” attitude strains credulity a bit, but Sammy makes us understand where Adam is coming from.

Adam Furano believed all humans were inherently good. If some took the low road, it was because they were misunderstood. He was confident they would find their way and believed all people were born empathetic.

There are some subtle or maybe not so subtle religious references.

The bullying goes far beyond the pale as Adam’s nemesis Jimbo recruits girls to beat him up. That is where the religious imagery was most noticeable.

As she walked, she suddenly envisioned Adam wearing a crown of thorns. The mind flash terrified her and sent her into a jog.

“That pansy’s time will come. I will make him bleed. I am seeing blood coming out from holes in his hands and feet.” Why the hell did I think of that? she though.

So, I beat up a saint today. That must make me a devil.

Everybody loves Adam, even those who hate him thanks to his overwhelming compassion.  Once you get that the story kind of clicks.  I don’t want to provide any spoilers, so that is all I am giving you on the plot.

If you are on the literary side, I would ask you to imagine Doretha Brooke as a slightly built male working class New Jersey teenager born in 1954.  Dorothea Brooke, as you and I both know is the heroine of Middlemarch, but you have to consider the other readers.  She is a young woman bursting with intellectual ability and idealistic impulses.  In early Victorian England that’s a problem.  I have found some speculation that George Eliot (Marianne Evans) based Dorothea on Margaret Fuller.

Adam represent a complementary problem.  What happens to a compassionate, caring boy in a context which was, in spite of all the ways Sammy Juliano and I might celebrate, marred by toxic masculinity?  Much as I am inclined to root for the home team Paradise Atop The Hudson is not quite as good as Middlemarch, but you have to consider that it is a first novel.

The Setting

As noted the story takes place in Fairview NJ and the surrounding towns 1961-1971.  The vast number of supporting characters are mostly real people who helped make the town such a vibrant community.  And then there is the music and the movies which are such a large part of Adam’s life.  His favorite song is MacArthur Park – have to love the kid.

Interestingly, the only reference to the war in Vietnam is a musical one.

“I can’t believe The Ballad of the Green Berets was No. 1 for five freaking weeks,” Adam muttered aloud, wondering how it was possible that a Vietnam tribute sung by an armed forces medic could invade a musical landscape inhabited by the likes of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Supremes.

Adam characteristically tries to explain the magic of the town to the bully he keeps forgiving.

Jimbo, I was thinking. What other town stages Italian feasts, firemen’s bazaars, Fourth of July fireworks, five annual holiday parades and another for the start of the Little League season? And then on top of everything, has one of the biggest amusement parks in the country sitting close to our border and a movie theater within it? This may seem like a small-potatoes community in the shadow of New York City, but I think when we are much older, we will look back at this place and time with deep appreciation. There are so many wonderful people. Priests. Educators. Administrators. Coaches. Librarians. Policemen. Firemen. Store owners.

Much talked about although never encountered is Father Charles McTague who would go on to become moderately famous. The characters mistakenly believe that McTague is the pastor of St. John the Baptist Church.  McTague who helped hundreds of refugees settle in the town was kind of the public face or St. John’s but he did not have the administrative chops to run an operation like that which included a new school built during the period.

St. John’s is somewhat opaque to Adam because he attends a Catholic church roughly three blocks away – Our Lady of Grace of as everybody referred to it “the Italian church”.  Because OLG did not have a school for Adam he attended Lincoln School K-9 and then Cliffside Park High School, since Fairview itself did not have a high school.  Even though I grew up in the same milieu and it is staring me in the face I never fully appreciated the St. John’s OLG divide till I read Paradise Atop The Hudson.

The other thing that I never fully appreciated was the effort that must have gone into keeping the Boy Scouts and the Little League and other activities going. My mother was quite involved throughout her life, but my father not so much and of course everything was highly gendered.

Readers of Paradise Atop The Hudson might or might not appreciate my treatise on Fairview geography.

Geography

I wish I had a better map for you, but the one below will have to do.

Note the way the streets are cocked at an angle to north south.  That is because the north south streets are parallel to the Hudson River.  It is the same in Manhattan across the river-except for Broadway. Using the streets of Fairview as a guide you are going north east when you think you are going north and south west when you are going south,  In Manhattan they call it uptown and dowtown, but that is a little too grandiose for Fairview.

Fairview is separated from the Hudson River by Cliffside Park and Edgewater – roughly a mile.  Because of the steep slope of the Palisades you can’t go straight east to get to the river. A straight line across the river  from the southern border of Fairview puts you around 100th Street in Manhattan and from the north border it is about 120th street.  In the sixties the ferry was a sort of once and future thing so the way to Manhattan was either the Lincoln Tunnel in Weehawken which brought you to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, convenient to the stretch of 42nd Street between Eighth Avenue and Times Square where back in the day the people of Sodom and Gomorah went when they wanted to let loose.  Now it is an extension of Disney World. Roughly equidistant there is the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee which puts you around 181st street.  I rarely used the latter.

We will continue on in a Fairview state of mind, which has the river and the palisade that Fairview rests on as going north..  The green patches in the middle are cemeteries which take up a good amount of the town’s area.  You will note one north south road Bergen Blvd in the center of the map. The unnamed one on the right edge is Anderson Avenue.  Note the lack of any major east west road.  This is indicative of another deficiency in the map.  It is two dimensional.  Travel in Fairview NJ, particularly east west travel is a three dimensional experience.  Much of Fairview is atop the Palisades a series of steep cliffs along the Hudson River.  The cemeteries are on the down slope and the area to the left of them is referred to as Lower Fairview,

The neighborhood that Sammy describes in the novel is bounded by Bergen Blvd, Anderson Avenue, Henry Street (where the Orthodox Church is) and the southern border of the town.  East of Anderson Avenue and south of Walker Street there is a sort of odd shaped salient.  When you are walking around there it is challenging to know whether you are in Fairview or Cliffside Park.  That region is kind of terra incognita to me, although I often had to cross if for one reason or another. North of Walker Street, Anderson Avenue creates a clear boundary between the two towns.

North of Henry Street between Bergen Boulevard and Anderson Avenue was “my Fairview”.  There was an attempt to impose a grid, but the terrain was not very cooperative.  North/South Streets are numbered First through Tenth with First through Third East of Anderson Avenue which are partly in Cliffside and Fourth Through Tenth West of Anderson Avenue.  Sixth and Eighth Street start start at Henry Street but neither go all the way up to Edgewater Road the northern border.  My block of Broad Street (later Kennedy Drive) was a long block that went from Anderson Avenue to Sixth street.  It was a busy street because it had two lanes separated by “islands” covered with grass.  And it went all the way from Bergen Boulevard to Anderson Avenue.  A slight jog there connected to Day Avenue which would allow you to work your way down to River Road making Broad Street a veritable thoroughfare.

There Is More

Sammy is working on a sequel which may be coming out in the spring.  I am looking forward to it.

Peter J. Reilly grew up in Fairview NJ and forty years in New England to the contrary notwithstanding still sounds like it.