The street is real. Marlboro Road runs through a Valley Stream neighborhood of sidewalks, small yards and short fences, and Ed Burns grew up on it long before he became the filmmaker behind The Brothers McMullen. On Tuesday, October 6, he published The Marlboro Road Gang, a novel that goes back to that block for the second time, and Long Island is once again the whole world inside it.

The kid is fourteen now

Burns introduced this narrator two years ago in A Kid from Marlboro Road, a novel told in the voice of a twelve year old boy in a working class Irish American family, loosely drawn from Burns's own childhood. The new book, out now from the independent publisher Seven Stories Press, picks the same boy up at fourteen, about to turn fifteen, with an all boys Catholic high school waiting for him when the summer ends.

In between sits the kind of summer that anyone who grew up here will recognize. The boy spends far more of it with his friends than with his family, and the friends carry the nicknames of a real block: Mark, T-Mac, Zeppo, Louie and Cakes. They ride farther, stay out later and answer to fewer adults than they ever have before, and the book belongs to them as much as to the narrator.

A bigger world, and a darker one

This is not a nostalgia exercise. As the gang pushes past its own few streets, Valley Stream and the towns around it turn out to be rougher than the boys are prepared for. The local beach has a pecking order enforced by packs of older kids. Fathers, it turns out, can hurt you when their own old wounds surface. The easy innocence of the first book starts to give way, and the narrator begins to see that even his own family is not quite the perfect thing he believed it to be.

That arc, a kid watching the adults around him turn out to be human, is one of the oldest in American fiction. What makes this version worth a Long Islander's time is that Burns is running it down streets he can describe from memory, at the age when a bike and a free afternoon made a hometown feel like a continent.

Valley Stream as a literary setting

Burns has been working this ground on screen for three decades. The Brothers McMullen, the 1995 film he wrote, directed and starred in, was famously made on a shoestring and shot partly inside his family's own Long Island house. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and launched his career. She's the One followed, and then a long run of films and shows about Irish American families in and around New York, including Bridge and Tunnel, his television series about Long Island kids chasing their futures in the summer of 1980.

The novels are the same material at closer range. Film gives Burns faces and streets; the books give him the inside of a kid's head, where a first job, a first fight and a first disappointment in a parent all land at full weight. Valley Stream has produced plenty of famous names, but it does not often get to be the setting itself. On Marlboro Road it now has a series.

Where to find it

The Marlboro Road Gang runs 288 pages and lists at 28 dollars in hardcover. It is available directly from Seven Stories Press, from the big online booksellers and through local bookstores and libraries across Nassau and Suffolk. Burns spent publication week talking about the book everywhere from national morning television to bookstore events around the region, so copies are moving.

Read the first book and the new one in order if you can. Together they are a portrait of a Long Island childhood written by someone who had one, and the second volume ends with the boy, and the block, on the edge of everything changing. A third summer on Marlboro Road feels less like a possibility than a promise.