This Boy’s Life, by
Tobias Wolff, is a memoir that I must have heard about ten years or more before getting around to reading it.
The book covers Tobais Wolff’s childhood from the ages of about ten to eighteen. The years covered are 1955-1963 and that the book takes place in between one war–the
Second World War— and another–
Vietnam— is significant as a backdrop, because we come to understand that Wolff will eventually join the army and go to Vietnam (“be careful what you wish for,” he warns us in his last mention of his wish to join the army). It is also significant in that the character Dwight, Wolff’s abusive stepfather, served in the air force himself, in World War II. He lives with his children, and soon with Wolff and his mother, on a military compound. Without ever stating it, Wolff suggests that it could have been Dwight’s wartime experiences that formed his braggart, machismo personality, and perhaps his violent tempermant.
Understatement is, in fact, the best way to describe the strengths of this book. It starts off with Wolff and his mother, fleeing from another abusive boyfriend, who later tracks them down to their temporary home in Idaho before they flee him again, for the last time. Before she meets Dwight, his mother will go on a date with a man who seems like a precursor to Dwight; a man who forcefully offers to buy young Tobias a bike, as if he and he alone knows what’s best for her son. The date will not work out, and only when she meets Dwight will the lives of Tobias and his mother start to fall-twistedly– in to place. Without ever stating it, it is implied that Ms. Wolff (not her actual name, which we never know) is attracted to reckless and abusive men again and again because of her treatment as a girl at the hands of her controlling father. Understandings such as this make one wish that we got to know Wolff’s mother better. But of course, it is Tobias who is the focal point of the story. He will first attend a religious school, and disobey, later develop a crush on his stepsister, attend high school outside of Seattle, get in to a fight, and eventually commit an act with a drunken friend of his that is considered unforgiveable–though today, most people would consider it an act of naughty teenage self-indulgence, warranting a grounding, at best. But in the morally-driven, communal world Tobias lives in, it shames him and his friend completely and ends up ruining the life of his friend. Tobias manages to get away by attending a private school and escaping his stepfather. But the moral, semi-impoverished sensibility of the world he lives in is sometimes contrasted with the elite, educated world of the wealthy classes and private institutions, as well as Wolff’s own father. It is a world that Wolff seems to desire by the end of the book, though he never suggests that it was a better one after all.
Wolff makes it clear throughout
This Boy’s Life that it is a story being told from the point of view of himself as an adult. Occasional asides about raising his own children or going to Vietnam are presented as way of framing how Wolff has looked back on certain events and what he learned from them. But in the end, Wolff is still an uncertain and somewhat troubled teenager who has not learned any great lessons yet, though the has experienced the events that will lead to maturity. This is gritty, intensely realistic fiction, though it is never bleak; Wolff and his mother always maintain comradship and senses of humor and his attempts to apply to a private school (which ultimately accepts him) make for some humorous remarks.
Wolff’s fiction is overall worth checking out. Prior to this book, I had read his short stories
“Hunters in the Snow” and
“Bullet in the Brain.” The latter story is one of my all-time favorites; in fact, it seems to achieve that status with anybody who reads it (read it yourself and you’ll see how unpretentious this remark really is). So, go and read Tobias Wolff. He’s one of the better still-living American writers out there.
