Brooklyn Boy

The script of Brooklyn Boy details the main character’s Italian-American beginnings in the New York of the 1950s and the profound effect that his extended, working-class background has had on his life. So great has this effect been that, as the character ages, he finds he thinks less of the momentous history through which he has lived, or of the intellectual life he has enjoyed, than of some things far more permanent, profound, and primordial: the people and places he knew as a youth, and that knew him; the war that traumatized his father and several of his uncles; the criminal element that pervaded his Brooklyn neighborhood and introduced itself into his family; the boxing he did and the baseball he played, the movies he loved, the teachers he revered; the English his family learned as well as the Italian he unlearned, or lost in translation; and the religion of his youth that he abandoned, yet that did not abandon him. The protagonist knows that he can’t go home again: all he can really do is think about it, which he does so eloquently in Brooklyn Boy.