As you’ll see from our excerpt, a gun is introduced early in Tobias Wolff’s mordantly funny and perceptive memoir This Boy’s Life, the October California Book Club selection. The gun is lovingly described as a “light” and “beautifully balanced piece” made from walnut stock that’s been oiled so much that it’s gone black. The gun seems to serve, for young Toby and then Jack, the name he gives himself, as a kind of protection against the life he has to live. In keeping with frontiersmen, he regards weapons as “the first condition of self-sufficiency, and of being a real Westerner, and of all acceptable employment—trapping, riding herd, soldiering, law enforcement, and outlawry.” The first thing he does with the gun is to break his mother’s rule that he not handle it without her or her boyfriend present—he shoots a squirrel and, shocked, begins to cry.
From the memoir’s opening sentence, Wolff’s journey toward Seattle feels very much of a piece with other stories of migrating west. The jobs he associates with the West inform his careful maintenance of the gun: soldier, cowboy. Jobs of the West that no longer bear the same imprint of the uncomplicated good guy that they did then. In the gun, he seeks a different story about who he is and his place in the world. “All my images of myself as I wished to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me.”
The image of the gun recurs throughout the novel—we suspect it will accrue meaning, since, a little like Chekhov’s gun, it appears in the first act. Chekhov wrote in letters, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” But instead of its firing being important, the gun provides clues to understanding Wolff’s development, which he further chronicles in another memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, which tells of his young manhood in the Vietnam War. He starts his tour of duty as an adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion with a belief in America as a noble country but, like so many others, comes away disillusioned. The American mythology around guns and good men, in his early years, when his mother’s boyfriend Roy gave him the Winchester, led Wolff down a road of experiences that changed his understanding of the world. The gun goes off, in other words, but not as we’d expect it to.
This Boy’s Life is marked by Toby’s youthful absorption of the myths, sometimes realities, of American masculinity, boyhood, and the nuclear family. His enjoyment of the Boy Scouts encourages him to embrace a certain image of a hero, and it’s not hard to see why he takes it up so fiercely, why he sees himself that way, even though he has to lie for much of what he seeks. When you live for some period of your childhood in poverty or in a low-income family, as Toby does here, there’s much to want. In this country, so full of abundance and privilege—reserved for only some children—it can feel at a deep level as though your intense longing for what other children shrug at and take for granted defines you. You yearn for some sort of consolation, something, whether material or spiritual or psychological, that can heal that deeper feeling that something is dissonant or not right, even if you can’t name what’s wrong and would never point to the country’s mythologies as the source. It can feel desperate, whether or not you realize it in the moment. For some, it becomes very important to craft a different story, one that sits comfortably in your psyche, lets you go about the business of your daily life.
It’s this longing that Toby possesses that one of his mother’s romantic prospects perceives and takes advantage of by offering him a bike as a ploy to, presumably, sleep with his mother; here, similarly to the gun, the bike symbolizes a kind of freedom to Toby. His mother’s suitors are all fairly horrible, but perhaps the worst is Dwight, an abusive liar. Later, in a memorable scene, we’ll understand his character, and how he works, by how he handles the gun. Young Toby crafts himself in the image of a hero, a Boy Scout, but as the author shows us with disarming candor and pitilessness, he was anything but, telling lies and engaging in petty thefts.
We know from Wolff’s biography that he finds containers for his imaginings—he became a writer of stellar, minimalist short stories, among other things. In a 1995 story, “Bullet in the Brain,” he writes of a jaded book critic who is shot in the head for laughing at the robber’s style of speech and delves into the path of the bullet through the critic’s brain, as well as his last memory of a baseball game, and what he did and didn’t remember as he died. This Boy’s Life somehow makes us take pleasure in memories of a difficult boyhood spent hoping for heroes and locating almost none, all while searching for and inventing narratives that he believed would lift him up. Wolff accomplishes that challenge here—This Boy’s Life is an exceptional feat of storytelling, memory, and, under some lights, self-preservation.•
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.
EXCERPT
Read an early passage from This Boy’s Life. —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin recommends Wolff’s memoir, praising “the author’s unflinching willingness to expose his character as well as those of the people with whom he interacts.” —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed last week’s event with Danzy Senna, read a recap or watch the video. —Alta
ON-SCREEN MYTH
Culture writer Chris Vognar writes about how the trope of the “tragic mulatto,” which Senna subverts in her novel, shows up in film and on TV. —Alta
LITERARY RECOGNITION
We’re thrilled for prior CBC authors Percival Everett (James) and Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), who are both finalists for the Booker Prize. Go buy their fantastic novels! —Booker Prize
DIVERSE SOUTH ASIAN AUTHORS
The South Asian Art and Literature Festival (SALA) will take place at the Stanford Center for South Asia on Saturday and Sunday, September 28 and 29. The theme this year is Plurality in Community. —salafestival.org
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