September 23, 2006

• This Boy’s Life

  I enjoy  reading a well-written memoir.  I’ll pass on the smarmy ghostwritten celeb autobiography and I’ll skip the snarky exposé.  Just walk on by, as my brother says.  I picked up This Boy’s Life at a huge book sale because, frankly, the cover drew me in.  I didn’t know the author but his name sounded to me like some obscure 18th century writer.  Silly me, they didn’t have cars in the 18th century.

  I read the first two pages and was completely drawn in.  With Amazon’s Search Inside feature you can read them. I highly recommend that you do.  This is the story of a boy whose father is absent, whose step-father is abusive, and whose mother is trying to make the best of a grim life.  That should make for a sympathetic reading; however, I didn’t like Toby/Jack much at all. 

  He is a habitual liar, a fighter, a shoplifter, a sneak–well, you get the idea.  He didn’t do drugs because they weren’t available and he didn’t “do” girls.  He managed to find many other avenues full of trouble. I wondered as I read, how we could know we’re getting the truth from the adult when the boy lied all. the. time.  I listened to an interview on Wired for Books and that very question was raised.  Tobias Wolff’s reply was that if he wanted to lie in writing the book he would have cleaned up his childhood, would have presented himself in a rosier light.  He explained that one of the survival mechanisms he used was creating an alternate persona that in some degree he believed was a real person.  One of the most engaging episodes near the end of the book involves Wolff’s receiving a scholarship to attend a tony prep school in the east based entirely on transcripts and letters of recommendation that he himself wrote. 

  The prose is pretty good.  I was regularly delighted by the vocabulary and his ability to pack so much meaning into so few words.  The analysis of his childhood choices and actions, the understanding of some of the undercurrent of his life is absorbing. Life was raw and he doesn’t smooth any edges.  This is a heartbreaking book, in the way Angela’s Ashes is a heartbreaking book. 

  It was springtime.  The earth was spongy with melted snow, and on the warmest days, if you listened for it, you could hear a faint steady sibilance of evaporation, almost like a light rain.  The trees were hazy with new growth.  Bears had begun to appear on the glistening granite faces of the mountainsides above us; at lunchtime people came out onto their steps and watched them with upturned, benevolent faces.  My mother was with me again.
  
  

  * * * * *
  

  I declined to say I was a football star, but I did invent a swimming team for Concrete High.  The coach wrote a fine letter for me, and so did my teachers and the principal.  They didn’t gush.  They wrote plainly about a gifted, upright boy who had already in his own quiet way exhausted the resources of his school and community.  They had done what they could for him. Now they hoped that others would carry on the good work.                ~     ~     ~     ~         I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself.  These were their letters.  And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face. 

   

  • 2:39 pm
  • 2 Comments