Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rate makings of an old-fashioned Jewish family story. If only he could have dropped his awful obligation to art-his cosmic gropings after sex and death, universal guilt, America! America!-all Author Orlovitz may really have wanted to do was write a nice quiet memoir about a Philadelphia boyhood, made up of such common scrapbook elements as a father hangup, comic aunts, and holiday outings in Atlantic City...
...other books; following two strokes; in La Jolla, Calif. The success of Waterfront, a collection of vignettes drawn from assignments as a San Diego reporter, enabled Miller to give up newspapering, but he always retained a feel for the short take and the simple truth-notably with his boyhood adventures in 1933's The Beginning of a Mortal...
With little sentimentality and few false notes, Conroy, now 31 and a freelance writer, describes a kind of Huck Finn-Holden Caulfield boyhood and coming of age in Florida, Connecticut and Manhattan, in the midst of a rather eccentric family. It is the most obvious of themes, but Conroy brings it off remarkably well, with an almost archaic narrative skill...
...scrubby wilds near Fort Lauderdale, he wanders untrammeled through woods and dunes, killing king snakes, munching Powerhouse candy bars. He regards mysteries of life with the eerie moral neutrality of boyhood. "Suddenly two of the birds rush at each other in the air. Quick as a wink, one of them is gone. Swallowed. A single yellow feather drifts down to settle on the moss. I laugh, delighted by the purity of it." In a familiar childhood rite, he discovers the intricate magic of a yo-yo that he has bought from two Oriental itinerant salesmen, and learns the various movements...
...complains, "mother-killers, grandmother-killers, sixth-year graduate students and spitballers who threw at your head; but I had never run up against people so lacking in the human graces." He found that New York literary types were not much better. One after another, the idols of his boyhood came tumbling down when he met them in the flesh...