THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s memoir of his nomadic, fatherless childhood searching for an identity and a future is hypnotically engaging.  In search of wealth and the right man, his divorced mother moved Toby, who renamed himself Jack, from Florida to Utah to Washington State, where she married Dwight, definitely the wrong man, especially for Jack. "I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in,” he writes, “and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it.”

Jack descends with no remorse into a delinquency that includes drinking, lying, stealing, destruction of property, and ultimately, submitting falsified documents to get into a private school. Without sparing the details of his misdeeds, the adult Wolff keeps us on the boy Jack’s side. I was halfway through the book before I realized that the pathetic bully Dwight wasn’t the only Bad Guy—just one old enough to know better, unlike his stepson. I thought of all the rebellious, unreachable boys I’d butted heads with as a teacher and understood Dwight’s frustration with this unlovable kid who was the price of getting the woman he wanted. Even a kinder, gentler stepfather might have failed to tame such a boy.

But Wolff makes us understand that at the heart of a bad kid is the legitimate, if misguided, search for some kind of personal power. Watching World War II movies, Jack knew that “the point of the show was to celebrate the victory of goodness over evil….[But] the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together,… to watch Stukas peel off and dive toward burning cities, tanks blowing holes in buildings, men with Lugers and dogs ordering people around. These shows instructed us further in the faith we were already beginning to hold: that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.” That’s the trouble with being a victim, Wolff reminds us—it can make you want to be a bully.

Jack ultimately escapes to the private school he lied his way into, but can’t succeed there either and is eventually thrown out. He “wore himself out with raging” and then joined the army. Wolff ends the chronology there, Jack still unredeemed. But in the final passage he relives a nighttime ride with his friend Chuck. Believing they have broken free of their wrong-filled pasts and are on the lip of a limitless future, they break into song. “It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.”

Jack/Toby grew up to be one of America’s most respected writers and teachers. I wish he would write a sequel; I want to know the details of the continued transformation from a powerless boy to a man who, having found himself, empowers others.