Deceptions

By Paul Gray

THIS BOY'S LIFE

by Tobias Wolff

Atlantic Monthly Press

288 pages; $18.95

Nobody expects memoirs by the rich or infamous to be gracefully written; expectations center on how much is dished up, not on the table manners involved. But the rules change markedly when it comes to autobiographies by the lesser known. Everybody, after all, has a life story, and the reluctance to spend money and time on a relative stranger's is considerable. This, the wary reader is likely to mutter, had better be good.

This Boy's Life proves good enough to be unforgettable. Tobias Wolff, 43, is the author of two collections of stories and The Barracks Thief (1984), a critically acclaimed novella. He is also the younger brother of Geoffrey Wolff, whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979), introduced tens of thousands of readers to the bizarre saga of the Wolff family. Although these two narratives have kinship and blood in common, they spring from dissimilar circumstances. The parents split up when the brothers were young. Geoffrey stayed east with his flamboyantly fraudulent father; Tobias drifted west with his mother, a lively woman who, the son writes, suffered from a "strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed."

Sure enough, she eventually finds Dwight, who lives with his three children from a previous marriage in the remote village of Chinook, three hours north of Seattle. "I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that," Tobias writes, but he is wrong. In fact, he is packed off to live with Dwight, and if all goes well, his mother will accept Dwight's proposal and move in too. All goes horribly. Dwight is a secretive bully who is either at his companions' feet or at their throats. With young Tobias, it is no contest. The boy is given demeaning, pointless tasks, constantly berated and subjected to drunken, careering rides up hairpin mountain roads. He could, of course, tell his mother about this abuse and possibly dissuade her from marrying Dwight, but he does not: "I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it."

That is about as self-pitying as This Boy's Life ever gets. Wolff's main interest is not the harshness of his childhood but the strategies of survival he learns, tutored by domestic eccentricities and the promise of a vast land where memory is short and every morning promises a brand new life. Though separated by a continent, he remains his father's son, a princeling of deception: "I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others." Hence he adopts a name, Jack, that he feels suits him better than his real one. An indolent student, he routinely alters his report cards, displaying what he could have done instead of what he did not do. After re- establishing contact with his brother, a student at Princeton, he sees a scholarship at an Eastern prep school as his avenue of escape. He forges his transcript and letters of recommendation: "I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself."

He finagles his way, most expenses paid, into the Hill School in Pennsylvania and is eventually kicked out because, as he confesses, "I knew nothing." But that is not exactly the case. His ignorance then was of the Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield variety, short on content and long on animal cunning. He has learned much since, without forgetting a moment or a telling detail of his struggles to begin.