Paterson Boy is a memoir told as a series of stories. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes ironic, and sometimes filled with heartache, Paterson Boy takes you on a journey that will make you reflect on your own childhood with its many disparate pieces. Collectively they are a rite-of-passage story with all the varied emotions that would suggest, minus the drama of war, incest, or physical abuse.
With a fresh, wise voice, Jerry Vis tells a marvelous story of the freedom of childhood, its loss, and search for the path back to oneself. It is also a tale of Paterson, NJ, as it starts to decline, of a neighborhood that is an entire world for an only child born into a blue-collar family just months before the start of WW II. It is a place of family-owned stores and horse-drawn vendor wagons, of aunts and uncles, grandparents, teachers, and friends. Jerry has an adoring mother who provides a decade of loving security and the freedom to explore his boyhood world on his own, and a remote father who comes in and out of focus in Jerry's life until he dramatically emerges center stage, along with a confusing mix of God, religion, and alcohol.
At the same time, other family members scheme, lure, cajole, and bribe Jerry in an attempt to shape him into what each thinks he ought to be, and in an attempt to save him from his father. Influenced by those around him, Jerry must somehow learn to find a way to become himself.
"?With crystal clarity worthy of Proust, Paterson Boy evokes a New Jersey childhood during World War II and just after. It captures perfectly, as a child experiences it, what adults take for granted: a seemingly endless train passing through town, a tree cut down, secretive relatives, a strange cellar. Through it all, we feel the process by which a child tries to decode the mysterious world of adults. Like the cellar hiding a mystery, what's underneath this memoir is the fluidity of remembered events and the sadness of what's lost as we leave childhood behind."
-Roberto Loiederman, screenwriter, writer for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and co-author of The Eagle Mutiny
