This Boy's Life This Boy's Life is a memoir by Tobias Woolff that was first published in 1989. Free download or read online This Boys Life pdf (ePUB) book. The first edition of the novel was published in 1989, and was written by Tobias Wolff. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 304 pages and is available in Paperback format. The main characters of this autobiography, memoir story are,. The book has been awarded with Ambassador Book Award for. Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the National Medal of Arts, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The idea of identity and performance will become one of the book’s most prominent themes as it continues to unfold. Here, the young Toby experiments for the first time with making a change to his identity and adopting a persona; he wants to become the archetype of a “Western” boy, and feels he must change parts of himself in order to successfully strike this new “pose.”.
Sidelights
As enthralled critics have so often observed, American author Tobias Wolff is a master storyteller. His short stories, novels, and memoirs have earned him an assortment of sought-after fellowships and grants, three O. Henry short story prizes, and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Much of Wolff's fiction is built from reworked recollections, and his memoirs—supposedly works of nonfiction—are embellished or edited versions of his personal history. 'All my stories are in one way or another autobiographical,' Wolff explained to Contemporary Authors ' Jean W. Ross. 'Sometimes they're autobiographical in the actual events which they describe, sometimes more in their depiction of a particular character. In fact, you could say that all of my characters are reflections of myself.'
Wolff tries to treat his characters honestly once he has developed them. He revealed to Francine Prose in the New York Times Magazine that he felt an 'affinity' for Raymond Carver's 'standards of honesty and exactness,' and his refusal 'to destroy his characters with irony that proved his own virtue.' Accordingly, with sparse prose, Wolff dwells on realistic, telling moments that represent or challenge the lives of his own characters. As often as not, they are left in the abyss of the daily existence in which they were introduced; they are not allowed happy endings or forced to suffer terrible, moral-proving consequences. Wolff is thus described as a realist and minimalist.
As Wolff demonstrates in his memoir, This Boy's Life, his childhood was difficult, but ultimately rewarding. His mother, Rosemary Loftus, was the daughter of a navy man who beat her every day. Although she provided security for Wolff, she also accepted a number of violent, unstable, or otherwise destructive men into her life. Tobias Wolff's father, Arthur Samuels Wolff, was a charming and talented liar who concocted a false history for himself and settled down with Loftus in Connecticut.
The New York Times Magazine 's Prose noted that Arthur Wolff was a con man who, while 'charming, charismatic, endlessly inventive,' was also 'a forger, a passer of bad checks, a car thief, a deadbeat extraordinaire, a compulsive spender, a dandy, and a heavy drinker.' His deceptions were numerous. Arthur Wolff was the son of a Jewish doctor, but he presented himself as an Episcopalian. Although he had been expelled from various boarding schools, he convinced people that he had degrees from Yale and Oxford. Wolff had also been rejected from the military because of his dental record, but he claimed he had been a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force. 'Some of Arthur Wolff's schemes worked astonishingly well,' commented Prose. 'Using faked credentials, he fast-talked himself into a job as an aeronautical engineer and became a top-ranking executive in the booming postwar aviation industry.' Eventually, though, his slippery maneuvering resulted in multiple arrests, three jail terms, and two ruined marriages.
The elder Wolff's storytelling talents influenced Tobias. In fact, as he told Contemporary Authors ' Ross, 'Both my father and my mother were great raconteurs, and my brother is also a wonderful storyteller. It's always been the most natural kind of thing for me to do.' Wolff began to write stories when he was just six years old. 'I don't know exactly at what time the idea hardened in me to become a writer, but I certainly never wanted to be anything else.' Rosemary left Arthur Wolff when Toby, as Tobias was called, was just five years old. Geoffrey, the couple's elder son, stayed with his father on the East Coast. Rosemary and Toby made their way to Florida, where they lived with her boyfriend, Roy. When Roy's abuse became overwhelming, Rosemary and Toby fled to Utah, where Rosemary thought that she could get rich picking up uranium. Instead, Rosemary found an office job, and her boyfriend from Florida found her. They lived together until he proposed marriage, and then she decided to flee from him once again, this time to Phoenix, Arizona. But instead of waiting for the Phoenix bus at the station, she and Toby took the bus that came before it. That bus deposited the two of them in Seattle, Washington.
After a time in Seattle, where Wolff renamed himself Jack (in honor of novelist Jack London) and made trouble at school, Rosemary married Dwight, a mechanic and house painter with three children of his own. They moved to the small town of Chinook, Washington, where Wolff was determined to work harder in school and create an entirely new reputation. Dwight's attitude and behavior, however, precluded that possibility. As Richard Eder of Los Angeles Times Book Review pointed out, Dwight treated Tobias 'as a perpetual interloper and rival.'
Dwight tormented and humiliated Wolff with continuous lectures and constant harassment. 'Tobias' stepfather assigned him a battery of tedious jobs,' related the New York Times Magazine 's Prose, 'stole Tobias' paper-route earnings, [and] traded Tobias' beloved rifle for an ugly, incontinent, gun-shy hunting dog.' When Wolff joined the Boy Scouts, Dwight volunteered as an assistant scoutmaster and thus extended his influence beyond his home. Incredibly, as Wolff wrote in This Boy's Life, Dwight once painted the interior of their entire house, including the Christmas tree and the piano, white.
It is in this environment, wrote Joel Conarroe in the New York Times Book Review, that Wolff 'gets an informal education in humiliation, betrayal, and injustice, and learns how to fight, cheat, steal, gamble and, especially, lie.' Life at home with Dwight and at Concrete High School became increasingly unbearable. Finally, at the age of 16, Wolff contacted his brother, Geoffrey, who had not even known where Wolff and his mother had been living. Geoffrey began to write to his younger brother, and Arthur Wolff invited his younger son to visit him in La Jolla, California. The day after Tobias arrived, Wolff left for a trip to Las Vegas with his girlfriend, and left Tobias alone. Later, when Tobias's brother Geoffrey arrived, Arthur had a serious nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Tobias and Geoffrey used the time to get acquainted.
'Geoffrey was the first person I'd ever met for whom books were the only way in which you could in good conscience spend your life. I already had the notion that I wanted to be a writer, but I'd never been with people to whom books mattered, people who had a sense that this was something a sane person would want to be,' Wolff told Prose in the New York Times Magazine . In fact, Geoffrey Wolff is an accomplished novelist as well.
Geoffrey had been to Choate and was in school at Princeton. Tobias wanted those things for himself, too, but he knew that his poor grades would not help his cause. Aware that he needed an outstanding academic record to gain acceptance to top schools, he invented one. Wolff forged his transcript and improvised enthusiastic letters of recommendation on school stationary. Noted Wolff in This Boy's Life, 'I wrote in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself . And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seems to me I saw, at last, my own face.' Wolff's fabricated history was convincing enough to get him a scholarship to the prestigious Hill School, far from his horrible stepfather in Washington. Unfortunately, Wolff's education had not prepared for him for the rigors of scholarship at the private institution, and he was eventually expelled.
Instead of finishing high school, Wolff eventually joined the army. As he explains in his book In Pharaoh's Army, he became a member of the Special Forces, learned Vietnamese, and was sent to Vietnam as an adviser. After serving in the Vietnam War, he visited England. Wolff set his sights on attending Oxford University. He managed to pass the entrance tests after months of study, and, fascinated with his courses, became a serious student. He graduated with a first class honors degree and stayed at Oxford to pursue a master's degree. After a short stint working as a Washington Post reporter, Wolff settled in California. He supported himself with odd jobs and concentrated his efforts on his writing. Wolff's talents were recognized with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, which allowed him to write in residence at Stanford. He eventually earned another master's degree at that university.
Wolff published Ugly Rumours in 1975, then sold several stories to various magazines and journals. Perhaps the most notable of these stories was 'Smokers,' published in Atlantic. In 1981 he unveiled In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. This collection of 12 stories was received with praise and enthusiasm by critics. The characters in these collections, from a boy who lies about his family at school to a shy professor who finally manages to speak her mind, are presented within the contexts of the daily lives they have created for themselves. As Le Anne Schreiber in the New York Times Book Review remarked, Wolff's range in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs 'extends from fastidious realism to the grotesque and the lyrical.' She congratulated Wolff on his ability to allow his characters 'scenes of flamboyant madness as well as quiet desperation.'
Wolff's 1984 book The Barracks Thief earned the writer more praise from critics and readers alike, and was recognized as the best work of fiction with the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1985. Although, as Walter Kendrick in the New York Times Book Review pointed out, the character of Philip Bishop 'plays a minor role in the events that give' the story its title, The Barracks Thief is 'principally' Bishop's story. The work begins by describing Bishop's childhood, while the conclusion discusses how that childhood led to Bishop's decision to become a soldier. The core of the novella features Bishop's haunting memory of a reckless moment in his past.
The histories of Bishop, Lewis, and Hubbard, three young paratroopers, merge forever in Bishop's mind on the day in 1967 when they are ordered to guard an ammunition dump at Fort Bragg. The three soldiers perversely consider allowing a forest fire to reach the dump and explode it. Lewis later becomes a thief and is thrown out of the army, while Hubbard deserts the force. Bishop, though, goes on to become a 'conscientious man, a responsible man, maybe even what you'd call a good man a careful man, addicted to comfort, with an eye for the safe course . I would never do what we did that day at the ammunition dump, threatening people with rifles, nearly getting ourselves blown to pieces for the hell of it.'
In the New York Times Book Review, Kendrick explained that the characters in The Barracks Thief 'are portrayed with clear-eyed generosity' and that Wolff leaves it up to his readers to decide whether it is best to live and die in 'safe conventionality' or recklessness. Times Literary Supplement reviewer Linda Taylor observed that readers may want to take in the book 'all at once—the ingenuousness of the narration and the vulnerability of the characters are disarmingly seductive.'
Wolff's next book was 1985's Back in the World. The title alludes to the shared daydreams of American soldiers in Vietnam who told each other about what they would do when they returned home, known as 'back in the world.' Back in the World, a collection of ten short stories, presents an interpretation of what that world is like for many people. In the words of New York Times Book Review contributor Russell Banks, Back in the World reveals 'the inner lives of middle-class loners in the Sun Belt lapsed materialists in a material world trying to ignite a spiritual flame despite being cut off from all traditional sources of the spirit—family, church, art, even politics.'
This Boy's Life: A Memoir, released in 1989, was an autobiographical book that describes, according to Eder, how Wolff 'masked and masqueraded his way through a childhood and adolescence that might otherwise have unhinged him.' The story begins in 1955 with the flight of Tobias and his mother from Florida and concludes soon after his concoction of a glowing school record has won him admission to the Hill School.
According to Publishers Weekly, Wolff 'characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity.' Eder commented that This Boy's Life 'is a desperate story. The desperation is conveyed in a narration that is chilly and dispassionate on the whole, vivid in detail, and enlivened by disconcerting comedy.' Times Literary Supplement critic John Clute reminded readers that This Boy's Life is a story about lying, and implied that it demonstrates the benefits of stretching the truth in writing fiction. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989. The book was made into the film This Boy's Life in 1993, and starred Robert De Niro as Wolff's stepfather, Ellen Barkin as Wolff's mother, and Leonardo DiCaprio playing Wolff as a teenager.
The 1994 book In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War was a long-awaited account of Wolff's memories of his year in Vietnam. Wolff told Ron Fletcher of Bloomsbury Review that he hadn't intended to write another memoir after he finished This Boy's Life, but a story he wrote about Vietnam was a catalyst for the generation of the memoir. He explained that to 'bring out' such memories 'is, in some ways, to disarm' them, and 'with any luck you understand the experience better.' The first version of the manuscript was a long one, and Wolff found it necessary to shorten it. 'A lot of writing is recognizing what should be mentioned and what should go unsaid,' he told Fletcher.
In Pharaoh's Army describes the author's training for the special forces and his experiences as an army adviser to a Vietnamese division in the Mekong Delta. His tour of duty is neither glorious nor exciting. While his life is threatened on occasion, he spends most of his time in a muddy village where he performs mundane jobs (like arranging the trade of a rifle for a color television for a superior officer). Wolff does not excel as a soldier. When he is ordered to lead a company on a jump, he misses the target by five miles. Publisher's Weekly noted that the book 'records his sense of futility and growing disillusionment with the war.' The book details the author's decision to leave the army and depart for San Francisco. Later, at Oxford University, his study of English literature allows him to regain his sense of direction.
Although In Pharaoh's Army focuses on Wolff's year as a soldier in Vietnam and its aftermath, flashbacks recall other memories and explore other experiences, including those with his father. He also remembers the year he spent in Washington, D.C., studying Vietnamese and conducting a romance (which ultimately failed) with a Russian aristocrat. Publishers Weekly praised In Pharaoh's Army and the 'great candor' with which he 'charts his evolution as a human being and a writer.' The year of its release, the book was nominated for the National Book Award and received England's Esquire-Volvo-Waterstone's Prize for Nonfiction. In 1995, it was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Wolff's next book, 1996's The Night in Question, was a collection of 14 short stories in which the characters search for identities beneath their everyday existences. According to Jay Parini in the New York Times Book Review, Wolff's characters want to find 'something authentic, something they can unmistakably call their own.' Moral judgment is sometimes compromised in these tales. In 2003, Wolff's first full-length novel, Old School, was published. In the book, students at a New England boys' boarding school in the 1960s submit a piece of writing to win a private meeting with a famous author. The narrator of the novel strives to win the contest so he can meet with Ernest Hemingway. 'His hunger to meet Hemingway at any cost leads to a series of shattering lessons that have as much to do with life as with literature—revelations about honesty and deception, identity and loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness, and about the crucial difference between fiction and falsehood,' explained Francine Prose in People. The novel was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2003, and both a Los Angeles Times Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004.
In addition to writing his own works, Wolff has edited several short story collections featuring the work of other writers. Wolff also serves as a professor of English and creative writing at Stanford University. Working as a teacher has its advantages, Wolff told Ross in Contemporary Authors. 'I still consider myself lucky to be in a profession where I am given a lot of time to write—a lot more than I would be in any other profession—and not only that, but where people care about writing and give you room to breathe if you're a writer; where you're with other people for whom writing is the most important thing.'
Wolff also spends months writing and revising each story. He explained his need to write and rewrite in his Contemporary Authors interview with Ross. 'Obviously by the time I come to write the last draft I know where every word is going to go, and every comma. It's in my mind from beginning to end, but there have been lots of surprises along the way that I hope the reader will feel even if I don't feel them when I'm writing the last draft.'
book by Tobias Wolff*
annotation by Lee Stoops
“…because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.
But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.”~ Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life
This Boy’s Life is just that: a boy’s life. Granted, it’s the story of a broken home, a sympathetic and easily-misled mother, and a rebellious and misdirected adolescent, but it’s still just the story of one boy growing up. Wolff pulls together the story of his childhood in a memoir that charms without being charming. He writes honestly and plainly about his youth – a time of making poor choices and learning from very few of them. There is nothing salacious in the pages. It’s not the fantasy life of a fortune’s heir; it’s not the sex-addled tale of a young stud looking for himself in the arms of faceless lovers; it’s not the adventures of a boy dragged to Africa or Mongolia or any other foreign land, forced to adopt foreign ways or be shunned and humiliated. This is the story of a lonely American boy growing up in lower-working class, mid-20th century, rural Washington State. This is a common story. But it’s told so well.
Wolff’s memoir opens with a truck crash and a death. It’s not him, or his single mother, or even anyone he knows. It’s happenstance. His mother’s car has overheated, and the two of them are stranded on a mountain road, running from a dissolved past into an unknown – and terribly uncertain – future, about to witness a semi-truck barrel past. “We stared after it. ‘Oh, Toby,’ my mother said, ‘he’s lost his brakes’” (3). This line of dialog, the only dialog in the opening paragraphs, gives the reader six words spoken by Wolff’s mother; six careful, manipulative, fully-toned words. They give Wolff’s mother away. She’s helpless and aware of her helplessness. In the following lines, Wolff describes seeing the wreck, understanding what happened to the driver, and how his mother spends the rest of the afternoon comforting herself by trying to comfort him. Of course, also by this time, the reader knows that Wolff doesn’t need the comfort but is happy to take advantage of the situation and leaves Grand Junction with toys. In those few short opening paragraphs, the reader knows Wolff’s mother, knows Wolff, and knows their plight. And this is Wolff’s tactic throughout the narrative. He tells his story; tells it scrubbed of emotion, excess language, or many sensory details. Yet, the story evokes nothing but these things. It’s startling just how much is unsaid yet never misunderstood.
“Dwight [step-father] stayed in the utility room for some time. After a spell of silence I heard him rummaging around. Then he said, ‘Come on, Champ.’ My mother and I were reading in the living room. We looked at each other. I went to the window and watched Dwight walking into the dusk, Champion sniffing the ground ahead of him. Dwight was carrying the 30/30. He let Champion into the car and drove away, upriver.
Dwight was only gone for a little while. I knew he hadn’t buried Champion, because he came back so soon and because we didn’t own a shovel” (178).
A master of the transition, Wolff manages to move from story into story without announcement or disconnect. He uses details throughout the narrative to lead the reader in a natural, thoughtful way, and then trusts the reader to make the shift with him. The transitions are never leaps but are always meticulously developed. Early in the story, Wolff talks about a .22 rifle Roy (a man he and his mother lived with at the time) had given him. He describes being alone in the apartment day after day, having agreed to never touch the firearm without his mother or Roy to supervise. Of course he touches it. Touching evolves into dressing in a camouflage coat and shouldering the unloaded weapon, marching like a shoulder. Soon, the young boy Wolff is acting the sniper; using the back of a couch and aiming at people passing by.
“…I followed people in my sights as they walked or drove along the street. At first I made shooting sounds – kyoo! kyoo! Then I started cocking the hammer and letting it snap down.
Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet” (25).
The transition is a tricky element, and Wolff succeeds every time because he trusts the reader to move with him without writing the reasons for the movement – he’s already set the story in motion, and, though it could go a number of ways, the reader expects it.
Wolff uses details freely, but very seldom describes things in vivid detail. When describing Veronica (an older girl he met while in the company of his rowdy high school buddies), he uses one sentence, but the reader can see her clearly: “She still had the pert nose and wide blue eyes of the lesser Homecoming royalty she’d once been, but her face was going splotchy and loose from drink” (186). Veronica is in the picture because of sex, not that there is a sex scene. Wolff’s buddies sleep around and try to fix him up with girls (they’re flabbergasted that he’s a virgin), but he keeps backing out. On the page after describing Veronica, Wolff describes his ideal, in vivid detail and interior perspective:
“I wanted to be with the girl I loved.
This was not going to happen, because the girl I loved never knew I loved her. I kept my feelings secret because I believed she would find them laughable, even insulting. Her name was Rhea Clark. Rhea moved to Concrete [Washington] from North Carolina halfway through her junior year, when I was a freshman. She had flaxen hair that hung to her waist, calm brown eyes, golden skin that glowed like a jar of honey. Her mouth was full, almost loose, she wore tight skirts that showed the flex and roll of her hips as she walked, clinging pastel sweaters whose sleeves she pushed up to her elbows, revealing a heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm” (187).
This mixing of descriptive styles does two things: 1) it gives the reader freedom to move smoothly through the narrative, relying on his/her own imagination for clarity and sense and 2) creates more power in the instances of fuller reveal.
Another blending technique Wolff uses is that of perspective. At times, the voice of the first-person narrator will move seamlessly between his boyhood experience and perspective, stirring in his grown perspective. One of the greatest examples in the book is his fight with Arthur and Arthur’s dog Pepper. Wolff tells of calling Arthur a “sissy” and of Arthur losing it. They exchange blows and eventually roll into the mud. It’s all very much his boyhood experience.
“Pepper followed me in my descent, yapping and lunging. There hadn’t been a moment since the fight began when Pepper wasn’t worrying me in some way, if only to bark and bounce around me, and finally it was this more than anything else that made me lose heart. It wounded my spirit to have a dog against me. I liked dogs. I liked dogs more than I liked people, and I expected them to like me back” (110).
The line “It wounded my spirit to have a dog against me” is a grown person’s perspective and words, and yet, it fits exactly as it should in the boy’s story.
This Boys Life Spark
Of course, Wolff is not without his faults as a writer. There are a number of head-scratching instances in the narrative – places that his story tangents to reflecting upon his grown life and family. The reflections are meaningful and well-written, but inconsistent, infrequent, and, every time, unexpected. Unexpected turns in narrative are interesting, but unexpected and out-of-place monologue-type reflections are distracting. On page 120, Wolff writes about life with his step-siblings, specifically sharing a room with Skipper and how disappointed he is by the way Skipper treats him. Naturally, Wolff shifts to wondering what life would have been like had he stayed with his father. And then, out of the blue (on pages 121-122), he writes about the future – visiting family later in life after Vietnam and being in the Army, about the birth of his own children, about everything that happens well after This Boy’s Life is over. It happens again on pages 232-233: he writes about Dwight’s voice being ever-present in his head and own voice, even as an adult, even as a father. “I hear his voice in my own when I speak to my children in anger. They hear it too, and look at me in surprise. My youngest once said, ‘Don’t you love me anymore’” (232-233)? The intention is clear, and the meaning is powerful, but the mention of his future life is surprising and unexpected; distracting.
Wolff’s power is a blend of prose and authenticity. As a reader, I found it hard to put the book down. As a writer, it was impossible for me to stop reading and noting his careful, direct, and artful style. Anyone can learn from someone else’s honesty, but it takes a truly bold story-teller to be that someone else – especially that someone else who can piece it all together so clearly and entertainingly.
This Boy's Life Book Pdf
*Page references are from Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Print.