Reading James Murphy's "The Green Box" is like listening to Gene Shepherd on the radio in a dark bedroom in the fifties and sixties, remembering his boyhood. Too tall, too skinny, too Catholic, too wistful, too everything, 15-year old Billy Sullivan tries to tell his mother how all he wants to do is cry. "Don't talk like that," she snaps, "that's the trouble with the Irish, they get too melancholic. That feeling isn't good. I don't want you to feel that way." "I know, Ma, but what if I can't help it? What if I have no control over myself?" "Melancholy can make you crazy. The institutions are filled with Irish who gave in to their feelings. Your Uncle Paul was like that and look at what happened to him." "What did happen to him?" "Never mind. And don't mention it to your father. It makes him sad." "God knows we have enough sad people around," she adds. And they are people with real reasons for worry: it's working-class Newton, MA, and WWII is on. All the men are gone. Everyone not doing defense work, too old, or 4F is either overseas fighting Nazis and Japs, or else already in the ground. To make up for the absence of fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins, the young hang out at The Green Box by the baseball diamond in the park. In spring, the city opens the box and the kids scramble for the sports equipment used for avoiding juvenile delinquency over the long, hot summers. Saturday afternoons they gather religiously at the movie theatre to watch actors playing their missing Dads, blasting hell out of the evil Krauts and Nips. To extend the action, they play guns on their way home. Billy Sullivan is the type who notices a difference: Hollywood shows war in victorious Technicolor, but the Pathe News shorts reveal the grim, black-and-white reality. War is ugly. And terrifying. Following every battle in the daily newspapers, Billy prays for the slaughter to end, but not before he's old enough to enlist. Meanwhile, he endures the pangs and raptures of First Fistfight, First Love, First Love Lost, First Clash with the Church, First Prom, First Drunk, etc.- all rendered so lyrically that we come to feel Murphy is recapturing our lost youth as well as his own. But make no mistake: this is a war novel. When a dead wino turns up in The Green Box, he is wearing his father's WW-One uniform. And when we fade away from the still-young Billy and back to him as a seventy-seven year-old rememberer, we see why his sadness endures: he knows now what a long line of fresh wars had been lying in ambush for him -- Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan - over fifty years and counting of seemingly endless wars waiting for him and us and our children and our children's children, ad nauseam. Maybe the Irish have known this all along. That would help explain the melancholia Billy's mother said can make you crazy.- Edward Hannibal