John Clute's review of This Boy's Life appeared in the TLS of May
12–18, 1989. The review also incorporates a notice of Ved Mehta’s The
Stolen Night
America is a land for the self-made man, the impostor, the teller of tales.
From the beginnings of American literature, Huckleberry Finn and his
brothers have been inventing themselves, lighting out for new territories
they hope to carve in their own image; but a dark twin has always shadowed
them, the confidence-man at the heart of the dream of freedom, for whom
identity is a sleight-of-hand. As he grows into adulthood, Huck Finn must
come to terms with that shadow; he must learn how to fabricate himself.
Perhaps, like the young Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life, he must become a
liar.
Now in his forties, and the author of three cunning and successful volumes of
fiction, Wolff knows a great deal about telling tales; and in his prefatory
note he makes it clear that This Boy’s Life, the story of a liar, is indeed
a tale, “a book of memory” with “its own story to tell”; the shaping
urgencies of re-creation – rather than any documentary proprieties – will
govern its fabrication.
We begin in medias res and in flight. Tobias and his alluring mother have hit
out from a bad scene in Florida – violent men attract her – and plan to get
rich quick in Utah, where they’ve heard that uranium can be picked up off
the ground. Their car has boiled over after climbing the spine of the
continent, and they have stopped. A huge truck hurtles out of control past
them down the steep Loveland Pass grade, for this is 1955, before the time
of the Interstates; and topples hundreds of feet into a canyon. Shocked,
Tobias’s mother becomes tender with her son, who parlays this moment of
weakness into a successful request for Colorado souvenirs before they leave
Grand Junction, though he knows there is no money to spare. But her guard is
down, and Tobias cannot stop himself. He is ten.
It is an anecdote which demonstrates more than Tobias’s precocious skill at
playing his audiences for profit; it also illuminates something of the
deeply engaging craft of the older Wolff’s way with a tale. In giving the
impression that the accident and Tobias’s manipulation of his mother make up
a dramatic unit, he may tell no actual lie, but readers today might
reasonably fail to know that in 1955 Grand Junction was many hours’ drive
westwards of the scene, and might well fail to notice Wolff hinting, on a
later page, that the two travellers almost certainly stopped overnight there
before slipping over the border into the hopelessness of Utah. Told with
this lumbering exactitude, however, the anecdote would have seemed nearly
pointless. Again and again, through polishings and elisions of this sort,
and through an adroit manipulation of time, Wolff transforms inchoate raw
materials into shining fable; about This Boy’s Life there abides a sense of
easy, limpid profundity.
That sense may not be wholly earned. The legerdemain is sometimes obtrusive,
and the sheer professionalism of the book sometimes gives it an almost
dandiacal tone, a glow that suffuses the most dreadful moments of young
Tobias’s perilous race into adulthood, making less than fully persuasive the
moral lessons Wolff derives from that race. But the lessons are there to be
absorbed. His mother drags him from Utah to Washington, tormenting him with
her need for a new man, eventually making the worst possible kind of match
with the brutal and hysterical Dwight, who fiercely resents his smart-aleck
stepson, tortures him and steals his money. Tobias’s violent father has long
since disappeared, but the prestige of his East Coast connections continues
to haunt the child with visions of a finer, more powerful life; while Tobias
is confined to high school in the ghastly town of Concrete, near Seattle, an
older brother is attending Princeton.
The only safety for Tobias – the only way he can maintain any saving secret
life – is to lie. Because the world offers him nothing to hold on to, he
must create his own. He must pretend to become a psychopath (which is
perhaps not very different from being one). He fabricates his past; he
cheats, steals, bullies, runs rampage; finally, by forging his entire
academic record, he gains admission to an exclusive prep school in
Pennsylvania. After a slingshot preview of the gruelling years to come in
that school and in the army, the book ends.
Because he is brilliant and compulsively audacious, Tobias comes much closer
to real criminality, and to serious personality disorder, than most of his
countrymen in the same fix – on the wrong side of the Divide. But This Boy’s
Life is also the story of the making of the man who could have written his
book only by learning the lessons it imparts; and that story is an almost
unalloyed triumph.
After six volumes, Ved Mehta has finally given an overall title to the ongoing
sequence of memoirs that began with Daddyji (1972) With the publication of
The Stolen Light, set in America, he has decided to call the series
Continents of Exile. It is a fitting title. Though never a refugee in the
most literal sense, Mehta has endured most of the categories of exile to
which humans can be exposed. Meningitis blinded him at the age of four. His
upper-caste Hindu family was forced to leave Pakistan after Partition, and
his father, a medical doctor and government officer, had to take retirement
at the age of fifty-five. The Mehtas became suddenly impoverished, and young
Ved’s path to prestigious Pomona College in Southern California was
hazardous. After three years at a school for the blind in Arkansas,
separated all the while from his family, when he does come to California, in
the opening pages of The Stolen Light, it is as though to another state of
exile, with no end in view.
But Ved at twenty is a man of consuming drive. With a driven and tonic
truculence, he has from childhood refused to admit that his blindness has in
any way maimed his identity, and at Pomona, caneless and careless and
serenely dogged in mien, he must have soon become a well-known campus
figure. Within, however, all was turmoil. Sexually reticent (books in
Braille were heavily censored), worshipfully disdainful of women in ways
common to Americans and Indians alike, financially insecure, lonely,
ambitious and frighteningly clever, Ved passed through college as though
running a series of gauntlets. But he survived, wrote his first
autobiography as a summer project, triumphed. In the deftly plangent New
Yorker cadences of The Stolen Light, he illumines the darknesses of exile as
though he were born to give vision.
