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A review of This Boy’s Life

by Tobias Wolff

Memoir of a confused young boy - one who almost ends up on the wrong side of the tracks

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

This Boy’s Life After his parents‘ marriage breaks up, Tobias Wolff – or Jack, as he decides to re-name himself upon their move from Salt Lake City to Washington – spends the years aged 5-15 with his mother and various stepfather figures. Jack is constantly looking to belong, to fit in, to re-make himself into images he has chosen one after another. What he’s going through is a desperate search to find and establish his identity. These are the 1950’s and early 1960’s; there are plenty of ways to run wild if you try hard enough: siphoning gas from neighbors’ cars, erasing and improving the marks written on report cards, falling in love with weapons. “I was a liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn’t help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade.”

What makes the book so riveting is the complete emotional honesty that Wolff displays describing what it felt like to be searching for who he was, who he could be. He has remembered and captured his feelings very intensely, making this a gripping page-turner about a real person.

With highly believable honesty, it becomes clear how the confused boy later headed to Vietnam to try to understand more about fitting in, about having a set place in a hierarchy – and to live out his love of guns. It was frightfully misguided, but it was the only way out he knew. “I liked being a Scout. I was stirred by the elevated diction in which we swore our fealty to the chaste chivalric fantasies of Lord Baden-Powell. My uniform, baggy and barren though it was, made me feel like a soldier. ... I read the Handbook for Boys almost every night, cruising for easy merit badges like Indian Lore, Bookbinding, Reptile Study, and Personal Health ... I liked all these numbers and lists, because they offered the clear possibility of mastery. But what I liked best about the Handbook was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy seem adventurous, even romantic.”

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: This Boy’s Life

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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