Word: wolff
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NONFICTION: African Calliope, Edward Hoagland ∙The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff∙ The Intricate Music, Thomas Kiernan∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙The White Album, Joan Didion ∙Zebra, Clark Howard
...Wolff lucidly discerns and expresses his complex, ambivalent emotions--shame mixed with admiration, repulsion juxtaposed with idolatry. His slickly-written prose deceives in its own way, presenting what must have been an exhaustive process of disengagement as a cinch to untangle. His rapid-fire style is possible because Wolff refuses to become mired in the devastations of youth. The straightforward manner could only be assumed by someone who has weeded an overgrown and tangled history and arrived at a resolution with which he can comfortably live...
...Wolff insists that despite its vile moments, "it had been fun to be my father's son." The joy is not apparent in his depictions of Duke's sick maneuvers. Case in point: an adolescent Geoffrey dubs a well-endowed schoolgirl "pear-shaped." When Duke finds out, he locks his son alone with him in the bedroom, strips him and beats him senseless with his razor strop (a prized possession incidentally, one of Duke's "glittering things"). When the punishment is sufficiently administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least...
...does someone forgive such a man, much less such a father? Wolff recounts the feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of sheer abhorrence he felt after his father's death. But eventually--or so he claims--he realizes, "I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him." Though it seems more likely that he did not forget his love, that this love never existed, Geoffrey's claim must be respected. Wolff writes to a Mr. Joseph, his Choate headmaster, that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever...
...page memorial. But this stinking jailbird did not bring up Geoffrey. The book is not about the real Duke, but the Duke of Deception, the father who raised a son "to be happier than he had been, to do better." Evidently he accomplished that goal and for that Geoffrey Wolff offers his compassion and his gratitude.Geoffrey Wolff and his children...