by Joel Connaroe
Tobias Wolff's first stepfather was not exactly a model parent. An alcoholic sadist who humiliated his young charge and regularly beat him up, he also stole his money and shot his dog. As if that weren't enough, he tried to strangle the boy's mother. Not a very nice fellow, and were he to show up in a novel we'd probably say that he lacked credibility, that the author had overegged the custard.
Life, though, has a habit of outdoing even extremist fiction, and while Dwight is presented to us not so much warts and all as all warts, he nevertheless achieves a certain bizarre plausibility. And yet for all his oddness he is not even the most incredible of Mr. Wolff's relatives. That honor belongs to his actual father, as we know from ''The Duke of Deception,'' a cathartic memoir published 10 years ago by the author's older brother, Geoffrey. With his fake coat of arms and nonexistent degrees from Oxford and Yale, where he was - that is, wasn't - Skull and Bones, Duke Wolff was a Gatsby-like con artist of considerable charm who somehow managed, despite his failings, to gain not only the rage but also the love of his oldest son.
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Mr. Wolff's title plays variations on Philip Roth's ''My Life as a Man'' and on Edmund White's ''A Boy's Own Story,'' but where these products of inventive imaginations are fiction that resembles autobiography, ''This Boy's Life'' is apparently straight autobiography - the facts, attired in their exotic garments. The book, however, reads very much like a collection of short stories, each with its own beginning, middle and end. Lifted from their context, the individual chapters would be at home in the fiction pages of any good magazine.
And the tale itself? In 1955, when he was 10, Tobias and Rosemary, his mother, left Florida (having departed from Connecticut and the Duke some five years earlier) to get away from a man who was violent, a trait he shared with all the men in Rosemary's life, including her father, who beat her every day on the assumption that she must have done something wrong. The mother-son duo ends up in Chinook, Wash., a tiny village about three hours north of Seattle, where they settle into a domestic nightmare with the besotted Dwight and his three children. It is here that Tobias (who now calls himself Jack) gets an informal education in humiliation, betrayal and injustice, and learns how to fight, cheat, steal, gamble and, especially, lie. (He even plagiarizes his first confession to a priest, claiming as his own an acquaintance's minor transgressions.) This streetwise training in a hardscrabble world makes up the major part of the book.
His formal education, if it can be called that, is acquired at a place with the unpromising name of Concrete High School, an institution not calculated to make anyone forget Choate (brother Geoffrey's alma mater) or the Hill School, to which ''Jack'' - forging both his academic transcript and letters of recommendation - ultimately manages to get a scholarship, thus escaping Dwight's tyranny. What goes on in the Concrete classroom?
''Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, ''What is your favorite amendment?'' We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer - ''The Right to Bear Arms'' - except for a girl who answered ''Freedom of Speech.'' For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I.''
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Tobias Wolff's first stepfather was not exactly a model parent. An alcoholic sadist who humiliated his young charge and regularly beat him up, he also stole his money and shot his dog. As if that weren't enough, he tried to strangle the boy's mother. Not a very nice fellow, and were he to show up in a novel we'd probably say that he lacked credibility, that the author had overegged the custard.
Life, though, has a habit of outdoing even extremist fiction, and while Dwight is presented to us not so much warts and all as all warts, he nevertheless achieves a certain bizarre plausibility. And yet for all his oddness he is not even the most incredible of Mr. Wolff's relatives. That honor belongs to his actual father, as we know from ''The Duke of Deception,'' a cathartic memoir published 10 years ago by the author's older brother, Geoffrey. With his fake coat of arms and nonexistent degrees from Oxford and Yale, where he was - that is, wasn't - Skull and Bones, Duke Wolff was a Gatsby-like con artist of considerable charm who somehow managed, despite his failings, to gain not only the rage but also the love of his oldest son. -----
Mr. Wolff's title plays variations on Philip Roth's ''My Life as a Man'' and on Edmund White's ''A Boy's Own Story,'' but where these products of inventive imaginations are fiction that resembles autobiography, ''This Boy's Life'' is apparently straight autobiography - the facts, attired in their exotic garments. The book, however, reads very much like a collection of short stories, each with its own beginning, middle and end. Lifted from their context, the individual chapters would be at home in the fiction pages of any good magazine.
And the tale itself? In 1955, when he was 10, Tobias and Rosemary, his mother, left Florida (having departed from Connecticut and the Duke some five years earlier) to get away from a man who was violent, a trait he shared with all the men in Rosemary's life, including her father, who beat her every day on the assumption that she must have done something wrong. The mother-son duo ends up in Chinook, Wash., a tiny village about three hours north of Seattle, where they settle into a domestic nightmare with the besotted Dwight and his three children. It is here that Tobias (who now calls himself Jack) gets an informal education in humiliation, betrayal and injustice, and learns how to fight, cheat, steal, gamble and, especially, lie. (He even plagiarizes his first confession to a priest, claiming as his own an acquaintance's minor transgressions.) This streetwise training in a hardscrabble world makes up the major part of the book.
His formal education, if it can be called that, is acquired at a place with the unpromising name of Concrete High School, an institution not calculated to make anyone forget Choate (brother Geoffrey's alma mater) or the Hill School, to which ''Jack'' - forging both his academic transcript and letters of recommendation - ultimately manages to get a scholarship, thus escaping Dwight's tyranny. What goes on in the Concrete classroom?
''Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, ''What is your favorite amendment?'' We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer - ''The Right to Bear Arms'' - except for a girl who answered ''Freedom of Speech.'' For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I.''
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