Word: boye
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother...
...packed off to live with Dwight, and if all goes well, his mother will accept Dwight's proposal and move in too. All goes horribly. Dwight is a secretive bully who is either at his companions' feet or at their throats. With young Tobias, it is no contest. The boy is given demeaning, pointless tasks, constantly berated and subjected to drunken, careering rides up hairpin mountain roads. He could, of course, tell his mother about this abuse and possibly dissuade her from marrying Dwight, but he does not: "I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that...
That is about as self-pitying as This Boy's Life ever gets. Wolff's main interest is not the harshness of his childhood but the strategies of survival he learns, tutored by domestic eccentricities and the promise of a vast land where memory is short and every morning promises a brand new life. Though separated by a continent, he remains his father's son, a princeling of deception: "I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others." Hence he adopts a name, Jack, that he feels suits him better than his real one. An indolent student...
...such an enfant terrible, was to become more royalist than the King and more ostentatiously greedy than his Palm Beach and Hollywood patrons. If the net result was a tacky, phosphorescent caricature of Genius at Work, an embarrassment to most aficionados, it is still inconceivable that Dali the bad boy will ever be expelled from the pantheon of modern imagination...
...loss appears and reappears in a series of densely detailed flashbacks. It begins when her father, a field naturalist, abandons the lyrical Canadian woods for a university job. She and her brother exchange a "rootless life of impermanence and safety" for the urban wilderness of conformity and cliques. The boy, a prodigy, retreats into a private world of abstruse science and physics. Elaine seeks acceptance by her peers, a gaggle of victimizing girls led by a meanspirited brat named Cordelia. Atwood understands that no subsequent humiliations can ever cut so deep as those of youth. The cruelties done...