Since his earliest work, Tobias Wolff has consistently employed a bracing, direct style that defies easy categorization. All the obvious words—timeless, classic, throwback—imply a fustiness that’s entirely absent. Wolff’s first-person narrators tell it straight (or so they’d like you to think), with a plainspoken, reflective equanimity that carries along both reader and characters. It’s always thoughtful, rarely flashy: a prose style perhaps best described by the title of his only novel, Old School.
Wolff’s most famous book, the memoir This Boy’s Life, has become such a classic that it, too, seems old-school, though hardly tired. This is a book that famously begins with a truck going over a cliff near the Continental Divide. Young Wolff recalls his mother observing, perhaps with a twinge of sadness as the truck uncontrollably speeds by their overheated car, “Oh, Toby, he’s lost his brakes.” Not long after they leave the scene, Toby realizes that, despite their lack of money, “the time was right to make a play for souvenirs.” Soon, he possesses “a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.” And we readers realize that this book will never become a sentimental reverie of a caring, perceptive mother and her son. Something pricklier will unfold.
This Boy’s Life details, almost excruciatingly at times, Toby’s gradual discovery that his impulses can be not only counterproductive but selfish, and that it’s far too easy to delude oneself in pursuit of one’s desires. What is it that Toby dreams of?
Stability, money, family—banal dreams, as he admits early on. “Unlike my mother, I was fiercely conventional,” he confesses. “I was tempted by the idea of belonging to a conventional family, and living in a house, and having a big brother and a couple of sisters.” What Toby wants is to have an unremarkable, fresh life, “away from people who had already made up their minds about me.” It is the fantasy of the middle class, the popularization of the American dream sold to a majority-white public in the wake of the Depression and World War II.
Published in the late 1980s but set mostly in the 1950s, This Boy’s Life is a far cry from 1985’s similarly backward-looking movie Back to the Future, which casts the ’50s as a postwar Pleasantville full of poodle skirts and sock hops (even Toby’s fantasies aren’t that banal). Wolff instead describes his childhood as a bit of a Dickens-Kerouac hybrid, far away from the suburban existence he craves. The landscape of rural Washington State becomes drab, oppressive, and isolating, reflecting the interpersonal strife to come.
Not long after Toby and his mother arrive in Washington, she marries Dwight, a manipulative, deceitful lout who delights in tormenting Toby purposelessly. This perversity, both bitter and darkly funny at times, both offsets and perhaps explains Toby’s own destructive behavior. Dwight drives recklessly along the cliff roads, endangering the entire family, cruelly mimicking their “Please, Dwight” cries. When Dwight makes Toby peel horse chestnuts for months, causing cuts and stains on the young boy’s hands, the pointless cruelty recalls something from Oliver Twist. But when the shucked nuts, stockpiled in a dank attic, eventually fall victim to mold, the bitter irony becomes something more akin to Twain or Heller. Dwight loses, but Toby has already paid a price.
Toby picks up from Dwight an unfortunate antisocial streak. He learns that one’s worst behavior can sometimes bring the greatest attention. On paper, when Toby’s mother marries Dwight, it brings Toby’s fantasies of a conventional nuclear family one step closer to reality. But in actuality, Dwight ushers in a new phase of unsettling adolescent behavior, far afield from whatever Toby imagined for himself. Sensing that Dwight’s presence corrupts his own behavior, making him less than the son his mother thought she had, Toby rarely lets on to her (or anyone else) who he is becoming. Reality remains far too disappointing.
Toby picks fights with classmates; ignores his shy, needy stepsister; plots, schemes, and lies. Wolff pulls off a delicate trick by recounting, with unflattering honesty, Toby’s boorish temperament while subtly reminding us that the boy has no one to learn decency from. He is fundamentally self-taught, casting about in ways similar (if more extreme) to how we all teach ourselves about existing in the world. Wolff never claims that Dwight exerts a corrupting influence on Toby—that would undermine the most seductive part of Wolff’s prose, which says but never states. Still, the absence of guidance means that Toby, at least for now, will remain rougher than most.
What, then, finally breaks Toby away from Dwight’s influence and sets him on the path to becoming Tobias Wolff rather than someone less reflective? Toby reaches his limit with Dwight and flees, looking for some other source of middle-class stability. He lies to gain entry to an elite East Coast prep school and rekindles his relationship with his erudite older brother. But you don’t need to read Wolff’s charming autobiographical novel, Old School (a quick-witted depiction of his prep school years), or his excellent subsequent memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (a similarly laconic remembrance set during his Vietnam War years), to learn that his road remained rocky.
The closing pages of Wolff’s coming-of-age account tell us that private schools and the fog of war gave a partial, useful, but incomplete education to our friend Toby. “Careful what you pray for,” Wolff prods us in the final pages of This Boy’s Life. We would do well to heed Wolff’s words, as he has reminded us throughout this beguiling, forthright memoir how two-faced dreams can be.•
Join us on October 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Wolff will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss This Boy’s Life. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
