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This Boy's Life: A Memoir (Paperback)
by Tobias Wolff
| Category:
Fiction, Grown-up story, Memoir |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An Affecting Story of Finding One's Adult Self in the Chaos of Adolescence. |
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Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Grove Press
Pub. in: March, 2000
ISBN: 0802136680
Pages: 304
Measurements: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00995
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0802136688
Language: American English
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- Awards & Credential -
The author has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
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- MSL Picks -
This was an extremely well-written and well-executed book from a technical standpoint. The writing was smooth and concise, with excellent flow, and the story unfolds in a way that seems almost effortless. Wolff adopts a remarkably objective tone in examining his own life, a tone which avoids making a melodrama out of his unfortunate childhood, while also creating a certain honesty that (eventually) makes you feel sympathy for a teenager who is not always easy to like. A side-effect of this detached viewpoint, however, is that at first I felt somewhat removed from what was happening. But I slowly warmed up to the young Wolff, and by the end I came to cheer for him. I also recognized many of the feelings he had while growing up, feelings that are hard to admit to and even harder to put into words. Wolff did a great job of exploring these feelings in an honest, tasteful way that was somehow both subtle and clear.
(From quoting Jesse Van Sant, USA)
Target readers:
Fiction, biography and memoir readers.
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Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
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From Publisher
This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.
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| View all 10 comments |
Philip Carl (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
The story is about Wolff's childhood. His mother nurtures him as best she can in between disenchantment with male suitors, employers and various geographies. As the good-hearted mom she gives Toby a pretty long leash to act out his child fantasies - at least the ones she could afford. Then she marries Dwight. And at this point in the story the main conflict begins as Tobias faces-off with his insecure, alcoholic step-father.
I read this book thinking: "My god, this Wolff kid is smart, funny, extremely crafty and got a wee bit of the devil in him." But than it's easy to forget you're reading a memoir written by an award-winning writer such as Wolff. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the adventures of Wolff as a teenager - always wondering how he would lie, cheat, steal his way out of his next jam. His innocence melted away with every turn of the page. But the innocence portrayed by Wolff lacked the quality of real naiveté to me. Overtime it felt more like a precursor, a set-up, for the devilish Wolff to emerge from. Or maybe Wolff just grew-up too fast in those 288 pages for my liking.
What can a person say about Tobias Wolff's writing? Lean? Clean? Outstanding? I venture to say that it's already been called out in one of the hundred reviews listed here. In all, a memoir delivered with a brilliant sense of place, time, and most of all the character of a young man finding his way. |
Steve Koss (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
In the opening scene of THIS BOY'S LIFE, young Toby Wolff and his mother are parked on the descent of a mountain road, waiting for the overheated engine of their cheap car to cool. An 18-wheeler suddenly blows past them, swerving wildly - his brakes are gone. Later, as they descend the mountain, Toby sees the semi has driven off a cliff, falling several hundred feet into a river below. This incident, obviously intended as a metaphor for the boy's life we are about to read, presumably signals bad things to come. Nevertheless, Tobias Wolff's boyhood memoir is a charming story of growing up in the 1950s in just this side of a trailer park culture, a story about creating adolescent identities as freely as trying on shoes until the right fit is found.
Not surprisingly, the main identity seeker in THIS BOY'S LIFE is "this boy." Toby lives with his divorced mother and her man friend, the physically abusive Roy. As the book opens, Toby and his mother are fleeing Florida and Roy for Utah, where they believe they can get rich by prospecting for uranium (this is the early 1950's, and atomic bombs were all the rage). Roy follows them to Utah where they settle for a while, but Roy's insistence on having children prompts Toby's mother to take him on the road again. By the luck of the bus schedule draw, they end up in Seattle. Over time, Toby's mother meets another man, Dwight, eventually decides to marry him (to give Toby a father figure), and moves into Dwight's home in the small town of Concrete. Along the way, Toby has changed his name to Jack because a girl in his class was named Toby, and because he likes Jack London stories. Roy has introduced Toby/Jack to rifles, and Dwight introduces him to the Boy Scouts.
Toby is not alone in seeking an identity. His childhood friend Terry Silver, whose father is a Jewish cantor, wears homemade Nazi armbands and yells anti-Semitic epithets at people he dislikes. Later, Toby meets a Father Karl who turns out to be a convert to Christianity and whose parents were Jewish concentration camp victims. Another young friend, Arthur, takes on the "good schoolboy" identity even though he and Toby both know that that's not the real Arthur. An older friend, Chuck, tells Toby about the marriage he has already fully imagined for himself, even as he faces the prospect of going to jail for the statutory rape of a girl in whom he has no interest. Toby's mother scuttles from job to job and man to man, choosing badly in most instances and then resigns herself to the consequences with almost Job-like endurance. Even Dwight struggles to define himself as something more than the loser he is, imagining himself among other things a great white hunter.
The real Toby in all of this, however, is a lost child. He is constantly in trouble, hangs out with other bad kids, disregards school, steals things from stores, attempts to forge checks, takes lying to an almost obsessive level, and ultimately gets caught stealing gasoline from a car belonging to a dirt-poor farm family. Curiously, he seems completely uninterested in girls and never gets himself into the kinds of female relationship troubles his friends manage to find. His most outrageous lie actually lands him an opportunity he doesn't deserve, and although the end result was less than a success, it seems to have paved the way for the adult Toby to emerge. The end doesn't justify the means, but without Toby's chosen means, the end would likely have been bad, perhaps tragic. So who can say for sure?
THIS BOY'S LIFE is a veritable paean to male parental dysfunction. Toby's real father, rich and living in Connecticut, is both physically and emotionally distant. The reasons are never made clear, a confusing circumstance given the apparently successful upbringing of Toby's older brother, Geoffrey (a Choate and Princeton graduate). When he finally elects to insert himself back into his younger son's life, Toby's father proves himself catastrophically useless. Then there are the physically abusive Roy and the pathologically insecure Dwight. Dwight in particular is the bane of Toby's youth, sometimes verbally abusive, other times physically so. He is a loser extraordinaire, laughably pathetic in his efforts to assert his manliness yet ominously dangerous as a consequence of his utter ineptitude. Dwight's self-esteem is so low that he exerts his power over Toby and his mother by driving drunk at high speeds with them, stealing Toby's paper route earnings, forcing Toby into meaningless "punishment chores," and partaking in weird control freak exercises like counting all the candies in the house every night to see how many Toby had eaten.
Slowly but surely, Tobias Wolff leads us on a journey that, through many twists and turns, reveals bits and pieces of the adult. We can imagine the man based on the childhood, and the author provides enough clues to point us in the right direction. Young Toby's life was indeed something of a wild, careening ride down a mountain road with very little for brakes. Wolff skids on the shoulder a few times and bumps a guard rail or two, but in the end, he avoids the cliffs and manages to reach what we can assume was a reasonable adulthood. |
Scott William Foley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
This book proved a superb read. In all seriousness, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I do so because, beyond his instinctive narrative style that both captivates and delights, Wolff substantiates the hard and fast rule in life that no matter how difficult of a childhood, one can always improve upon oneself.
Wolff is currently a professor at Stanford (unless things have changed without my knowledge), earned his B.A. at Oxford and received his M.S. at Stanford as well. This is incredible considering the childhood he laid out in This Boy's Life. Wolff was not a good little boy, to say the least. He was guilty of lying, stealing, cursing, fighting, forgery, and being rather unattached to anything or anyone but his mother. He spent several years with an abusive stepfather who, while never out-and-out beating him, put him through psychological trauma just as severe. It's amazing this man has become one of America's greatest writers, but I suppose all great talent was forged in blazing fires.
Wolff does not mince words and, while not a simple read, his memoir it moves very quickly. He did a masterful job of pacing the narrative so as to make things suspenseful without any truly dramatic plot twists. After all, this is his real life. Real life is something that happens, not something that follows a plot line. Wolff takes his real life and weaves it into a fascinating tale that I couldn't put down. |
Mary Whipple (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Leaving Sarasota, Florida, in a run-down Nash Rambler in 1955, Toby Wolff, then ten, and his mother are looking forward to a new life in Utah. Not long after arriving, however, the two make a sudden, night-time departure for newer pastures in Seattle - the mother's abusive relationship in Utah having become intolerable. Later Toby and his mother gravitate to Chinook, a remote village in the Cascades. His mother marries a tough man who cruelly punishes Toby (who has changed his name to Jack in honor of Jack London) for infractions, sells some of Toby's belongings, and tries to enforce military discipline on him.
Wolff's story of his grim life from age ten through high school is a breath-taking recreation, filled with the sorts of longings that motivate sensitive young boys everywhere, but also filled with an a self-awareness that is rare in such autobiographies. Jack (Toby) is a rebel - a sometime kleptomaniac, thief, cheater, liar, and schoolboy miscreant who loves his mother, hates his stepfather (and generally tries to avoid him), and hangs out with similarly alienated, hell-raising schoolmates, who often "escape" through alcohol.
When he is a sophomore in high school, he talks with his older brother for the first time in six years. His brother, now a student at Princeton, remained with his father when his parents split, and he encourages Jack to apply as a scholarship student to an eastern boarding school, thereby escaping his step-father and starting yet another new life. Jack's only academic interest to date has been in writing, thanks to the inspiration of his English teacher, but he is intrigued with the idea of escape. The story of how Wolff lies and cheats his way into a prep school is a classic. (The fictionalized story of his boarding school life appears in his recent novel, Old School.)
Throughout this self-examination, which is hilariously funny in many places and remarkably astute, Jack sees himself as the "Jack" he invents to suit circumstances, while simultaneously revealing himself as he really is, the hidden "Jack." Like many his age, he often takes the easy way out, and he recognizes this, too. As he grapples with perennial issues of growing up, needing to be accepted, learning what is "right," and changing his behavior to meet the differing expectations of peers, family, and the preacher with whom he lives for three months, he comes to new understandings about himself and his place in the world. One of the best and most honest coming-of-age stories ever written, This Boy's Life is a modern classic. |
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