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A review of The Duke of Deception

by Geoffrey Wolff

Honest, straightforward autobiography of a man and his father in the first half of the 20th century.

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

The Duke of Deception I search stories about relationships with fathers – be the fathers themselves good, bad, or indifferent – for meaning, since I lost my dad to cancer when I was in my late teens and have tried to understand since then who he was. This book's gift is to deal honestly and self-deprecatingly with the slippery subject of who Geoffrey Wolff's father, "Duke", was to the author, to others, and what that meant for Wolff's character formation. This is not discussed from a distance or pedantically, simply straight on.

Like A Perfect Spy, The Duke of Deception is about a con artist father with a strong sense of style, and is written from his son's point of view. Geoffrey Wolff says "thank God" when he learns that his father has died; le Carré's character Magnus Pym says "I'm free" about the same moment. If you read the books in close succession, you can learn an incredible amount about fathers and sons, about the motivations and schemes of con artists, about human survival techniques and resilience.

"My father, called Duke, taught me skills and manners; he taught me to shoot and to drive fast and to read respectfully and to box and to handle a boat and to distinguish between good jazz music and bad jazz music." A warm description of what it might take to become a man, what a father needs to teach his son. But ultimately also a good description of the ‘bullshit artist' Duke was. "He was lavish with money, with others' money. He preferred to stiff institutions: jewelers, car dealers, banks, fancy hotels."

The question Wolff asks himself – and that we too want to understand – is how a bad man could be a good father. Until he was 12, Geoffrey and his parents and his younger brother Tobias (who has also written a memoir) lived all over the country, wherever Duke got a job in the aviation industry. Jobs changed quickly for many reasons: Duke was considered unreliable or the inconsistencies in his resume became apparent. Then his parents split up, and Duke chose to live with his dad.

As Geoffrey grows older, he learns his father has told him many things that weren't true: that he grew up in a solid Christian family, attended Yale, had been a fighter pilot in WWII. Not only did he tell his sons these lies, he almost believed them himself. Using a series of mostly fictitious resumes he was, astonishingly, able to get 15 years of work as an aeronautical engineer without any academic training in the field. Duke chose to drop the fact that he was Jewish from his resume, though he grew up in Hartford as the son of an influential and domineering Jewish doctor. The author desperately wants to understand what motivated him to do so.

The author has gone through his father's school records and carefully read headmasters' comments. Uncanny is not only how quickly the outlines of his later labile character were clear, but how the son went through the same things a generation later: thrown out of boarding schools, diagnosed as sociable but without structured learning habits (Geoffrey later gained them with a year at Oxford). The similarities continue: loving to drive fast cars (dad typically bamboozled salesmen to buy them on credit and then hightailed it on out of that town) and speedboats, cultivating casual male friendships typical of boarding school and Ivy League, embroiling themselves in fabrications about family wealth and status. "The week after my sixteenth birthday I got my Connecticut driver's license, traded my racing boat for a 1948 Austin sedan, and wrecked it three days later. Five weeks after my sixteenth birthday I was given a new Porsche 1300 convertible, and by then was smoking and drinking at will in my father's presence." The Porsche was not paid for.

Your reviewer had managed to forget (suppress?) the antagonistic relationship in the 1950's between teenaged girls and boys, the pre-pill haggling about how far he was allowed to go. Wolff was a child of his times. He wanted one thing more than anything else: to get under her sweater and between her legs, it being relatively unimportant who she was. An add-on in this book is one of the best descriptions of this fortunately outdated mode of interaction.

It's the willingness to explore painful memories to get at what was really happening that I so love. This is not a novel, where the author plays God and does what he wants with characters and plot, setting us all up just the way he wants. No, this is autobiography, one man's successful attempt to capture emotional truth on paper.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Duke of Deception

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews









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