Like so many of the greatest American books, This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, is a story of the West. In the memoir’s indelible opening scene, Wolff, known as Toby, and his mother are driving across that meaning-rich line called the Continental Divide when a massive truck loses its brakes and careers off a cliff: a portent of the catastrophic westward years the pair have in store.
“For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair,” Wolff writes, and then, with characteristically precise recall of a child’s way of thinking, “I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs.” Though the mother and son are saving their nickels, he ends up leaving Grand Junction with “a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.”
The whole memoir is embodied in the anecdote: tragedy, surprised and capsized by irony. It is probably the funniest book ever written about child abuse; indeed, the writer it most immediately calls to mind is the Dickens of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, recounting violent wrongs in a comic novelist’s voice. The story begins with the young Wolff and his mother’s attempt to make new lives in Utah, then Seattle, then northern Washington, where they fall into the grips of an inept tyrant named Dwight. It ends with Wolff’s equivocally successful escape to a boarding school in the Northeast. In between, it feels both particular and universal—a portrait of the cold, confused, often brutal experience of American childhood in the 1950s in any circumstances other than the nuclear family.
Wolff’s family history was already famous when he published This Boy’s Life. Ten years before, his older brother Geoffrey had published a memoir about their father, itself a classic, called The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father. In that book, Geoffrey describes the enchanted, charismatic, conscienceless con artist who so successfully forged a false identity—Yale, the Office of Strategic Services, and a name, Saunders Ansell-Wolff III, concealing his Jewish background—that he became a major aviation executive, defrauding landlords, colleagues, and his own family along the way, landing in prison several times.
This Boy’s Life begins as the author and his mother are leaving his father, known as Duke, behind. “Everything was going to change when we got out West,” Wolff writes, and we believe it mostly because of his plucky and lovely mom, for whom, despite it all, the book radiates with love. “She made the world seem friendly,” he tells us. She “did not expect to find people dull or mean; she assumed they would be likeable and interesting, and they felt this assurance, and mostly lived up to it.”
Yet she has a fatal flaw, which is her “strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed.” (Its origin is no mystery: In a chilling passage, we learn that her father spanked her nightly after dinner on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day—after which she had to “kiss him and say, ‘Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal.’”)
It’s this trait that allows them to fall prey to Dwight, the most vivid character in This Boy’s Life, indeed one of the most vivid characters in American literature. At first, Wolff doesn’t worry about him. “He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong.” But once Dwight seduces them from Seattle to rural Washington, his torments begin. He’s physically abusive, but perhaps worse still is the ambient fear he creates, which Robert De Niro captured so totally in the film made of the book. “How he used to stay up late counting all the pieces of candy in the house to see how many I’d eaten that day. How he used to run into the living room when he came home and put his hand on top of the TV to see if it was warm,” Wolff recounts.
In a sense, the real subject This Boy’s Life explores is identity and its elusiveness for the abused child. “I was subject to fits of feeling myself unworthy, somehow deeply at fault,” Wolff writes. He changes his name from Toby to Jack, falls in with various crowds of drinkers and thieves and gun addicts, and, along the way, starts to tell wild lies, like his father, making up grandiose tales about himself and his family and his future, dreaming, as all children in his position must, of transformation. The book’s title is taken from his assiduous career in the Boy Scouts, which matches the self-image he concocts to escape the violent instability of his circumstances. “Boy’s Life, the official Scout magazine, worked on me in the same way. I read it in a trance, accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated.”
The magic of This Boy’s Life, what gives it such rare weight and beauty, is that those fabulations and errors make us love the author—the act of confessing their dishonor conferring on him a strange honor. We sense the desperation of Toby’s motivations, that he is trying to flee an imprisonment. When he fakes his materials to get into the Hill School, an elite East Coast prep school, it’s thrilling. He’s going to get away from Dwight. He does get away from Dwight. One of the greatest lines ever slipped into an Acknowledgments section, that odd little meta-genre, reveals the memoir to be a completion of this getaway. “My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book,” Wolff writes. “Well, here it is.”
In these only faintly more enlightened days, we have the word trauma for what This Boy’s Life depicts. We didn’t when I was growing up. Instead, we had books—a few rare exceptional books like this one, which described both broadly and minutely the contours of that experience without naming it, books that told stories in place of diagnosis, which affirmed something like, It is not just you. It has happened before, to another child, elsewhere. Lord, how they helped.
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.
