Wolff shifts to nonfiction in this jewel-like memoir of childhood
in the 1950's. Despite the all-American props - Boy Scouts, cars,
basketball - this boyhood unfolds light-years away from suburban
heaven, offering instead a divorced mother and her angry son trying
with little success to cut a piece of the American pie. Wolff sets
the tone right off the bat, as he and his mom, driving to Utah to
strike it rich as uranium prospectors, watch a truck careen towards
a fatal crash. From then on, one dark episode follows another.
Wolff recalls his early years in Florida, where he shoots arrows at
friends and lies in the confessional. When he and his doting mom
finally settle in Seattle, he becomes a petty delinquent,
shoplifting, drinking, writing bad checks, breaking windows,
scrawling obscenities on walls. Some of this seems reaction against
his wealthy, estranged father, now dead, about whom he feels "grief
and rage, mostly rage." Most adults treat him shabbily - a problem
accentuated when his mother links up with a man named Dwight, a
Lawrence Welk freak who smells of turpentine and brutalizes Wolff
into husking chestnuts until his fingers bleed. He finds some
relief in the Boy Scouts, which offers "the clean possibility of
mastery"; in high school, he dreams of running away to Alaska, but
instead he escapes to a prep school in Pennsylvania. An honest
memoir that puts a new spin on familiar boyhood rituals: many
authors have recalled watching Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club,
but how many write about their buddies shouting crude sexual
come-ons at the screen? Lucid, bitter, precise, terribly sad: the
real-life equivalent of Wolff's acclaimed fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)
A memoir of a young boy's unusual travels with his mother. The
author recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his
mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his
experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the
background of a violent and wildly optimistic America.
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