THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff (Picador 1990, first published 1989)
I picked this book up by chance in a second-hand store in Rimini. There was a copy of Wolff’s collected short stories too but I was more drawn to this autobiography or ‘memoir’ as he prefers to call it.
The cover promises something of the mythical America I know mainly from movies. The illustration by Irish painter Kenny McKendry shows a station wagon being filled up at a remote gas station and a young male figure standing apart in a cap and dungarees. It’s like an open air version of an Edward Hopper painting.
I also liked the author’s choice of epigraphs; one by Saul Alinsky (“He who fears corruption fears life”) and the other by Oscar Wilde: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered”. Both these quotations suggest an unconventional, yet worldly wisdom and humor.
I knew nothing of the writer nor that the book had been made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and a very young Leonardo DiCaprio. If you Google the book title, you get an image of these two A-list actors in Boy Scout uniforms.
I decided not to watch any trailers or clips so as not to be distracted or influenced by someone else’s views of the story. I habitually avoid synopses and reviews for the same reason; something that’s getting harder and harder to do in the age of information overload. I like coming to things with as blank a slate as possible so I can make my own mind up.
This Boy’s Life is a slight variant on Boy’s Life, the official scout magazine. Scouting is, fortunately, only one strand of the story which takes up the formative years of Wolff’s life from 1955, when he was 10, to the time when he has to choose between university or other options, I guess in his late teens. Continue reading
