TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020689/02068900.071

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.8 KB | 80 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 70

Deceptions


By Paul Gray


    THIS BOY'S LIFE
    by Tobias Wolff
    Atlantic Monthly Press; 288 pages; $18.95

    Nobody expects memoirs by the rich or infamous to be
gracefully written; expectations center on how much is dished
up, not on the table manners involved. But the rules change
markedly when it comes to autobiographies by the lesser known.
Everybody, after all, has a life story, and the reluctance to
spend money and time on a relative stranger's is considerable.
This, the wary reader is likely to mutter, had better be good.

    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, a lively woman who, the son writes, suffered from a
"strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant
breed."

    Sure enough, she eventually finds Dwight, who lives with
his three children from a previous marriage in the remote
village of Chinook, three hours north of Seattle. "I knew my
mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like
that," Tobias writes, but he is wrong. In fact, he is 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 I was bound
to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to
take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and
would never stop questioning my right to it."

    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, he routinely alters his report cards,
displaying what he could have done instead of what he did not
do. After re-establishing contact with his brother, a student
at Princeton, he sees a scholarship at an Eastern prep school
as his avenue of escape. He forges his transcript and letters
of recommendation: "I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the
words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew
myself."

    He finagles his way, most expenses paid, into the Hill
School in Pennsylvania and is eventually kicked out because, as
he confesses, "I knew nothing." But that is not exactly the
case. His ignorance then was of the Huckleberry Finn, Holden
Caulfield variety, short on content and long on animal cunning.
He has learned much since, without forgetting a moment or a
telling detail of his struggles to begin.