This Boy's Life
Wolff, Tobias
Communication Arts I
This book was taken through the formal challenge process at Blue Valley during the 2003-2004 school year. The Board voted 7-0 to continue using the book as a required reading assignment for freshmen students. Click here to read quotes from Blue Valley officials and patrons about this book. Click here to read the chronology to the challenge of This Boy's Life.
This Boy's Life is the memoir (autobiography) of Tobias Wolff's life as a high school boy in the 1950s. Tobias leads the life of a juvenile delinquent. He lies, swears, steals, drinks, cheats, practices to be a sniper, and vandalizes. His destructive actions are in part a response to circumstances out of his control -- his parents are divorced and his mother remarries a man who is mentally and physically abusive to him. Yet within these difficult circumstances, Tobias makes life much worse for himself by taking a deliberate series of choices that hurt others.
For example, he steals gas from a very poor neighboring farmer in order to go on a joy ride with his friends. After being caught with the gas, he returns to the farm with another boy who was also involved in the theft. The other boy's apology is accepted by the farmer. Tobias refuses to apologize and spends several paragraphs justifying why "he just couldn't do it." This consistently deceitful and destructive approach to life creates a very depressing memoir.
The book concludes with Wolff being admitted to Hill, a prestigious eastern boy's prep school. His admission is based on an application he forged. He steals school letterhead which he uses to fabricate the necessary credentials (transcript, letters of recommendation) to be considered for the school. In addition, he accepts a scholarship from the school which pays for about 75% of his tuition and gets fitted for an entirely new wardrobe from a benevolent alumnus. And while his entire experience at Hill is based on lies, it squares with his sense of justice. His only worry throughout this process is that he will be "found out." Throughout the book, he sees himself as a man of character, ready to escape his circumstances and live a new life. Yet at no time does he ever come to the realization that his own actions define his character - in fact, his egregiousness actions only become bolder, culminating in his falsified admission to Hill.
While literary experts praise this book for its "absolutely clear and hypnotic" nature (as printed on the back cover of the book, New York Times), I found that for the first three-quarters of the book, I had to "force" myself to trudge on, due only to my duty to write this review. The last few chapters were less boring, due to my desire to see how Wolff's scam on the Hill prep school would play out. (Wolff attends Hill for a couple years but is eventually kicked out for a variety of reasons. His falsified application is never "found out," at least according to what Wolff suggests in this book.)
In addition, there are a variety of sexually-suggestive scenes and topics. I've tried to provide most of those scenes in the excerpts found below. While these excerpts cannot give you a complete picture of the overall tone and content of the book, they do provide some insight about what your child will be reading should they be assigned this book.
p. 24-26 Tobias practices being a sniper...
"The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I began to act like one. I set up a nest on the couch by the front window. I drew the shades to darken the apartment, and took up my position. Nudging the shade aside with the rifle barrel, 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. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by-women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone-and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe."
p. 41 Tobias practices being a thief and a vandal...
"We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn't under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars."
p. 42 Tobias uses sexually crude language...
"At five o'clock we turned on television and watched The Mickey Mouse Club. It was understood that we were all holding a giant bone for Annette."
p. 47 Tobias's friend uses a racist slur...
Breathing loudly, clenching and unclenching his jaw, he leaned over the edge and cupped his hands in front of his mouth and screamed a word I had heard only once, years before, when my father shouted it at a man who had cut him off in traffic.
"Yid!" Silver screamed, and again, "Yid!"
p. 61 More vandalism….
"We got away with it. … We became self-important, cocksure, insane with our arrogance. We broke windows. We broke streetlights. We opened the doors of cars parked on hills and released the emergency brakes so they smashed into the cars below. We set bags of shit on fire and left them on doorsteps..."
p. 61 More stealing…
"And we stole. I was a thief. By my own estimation, a master thief."
p. 76 Using the f-word and more vandalism…
"I mean I blew it off, man - I blew his fucking head right off!"….
"Fuckin' A," I said. "Winchester .22. Pump."
"Wolff," he said, "you are so full of shit."
"Fuck you, Silver, I don't care what you think."
"Fuck you, Silver, I said, and when he howled again I said, "Fuck. You. Fuck. You."
With the tail of a comb I scratched FUCK YOU into the soft paint and once more told Silver, "Fuck you."
p. 79 Tobias's mother defends him for writing FUCK YOU in the bathroom…
"What obscene words?" she asked
He hesitated. Then, demurely, he said, "Fuck you."
"That's one obscene word," my mother said.
p. 102 More profanity...
"I just couldn't perform solemn and efficient resuscitation upon the body of a boy who was whispering that his pud was waterlogged and in need of a big squeeze."
p. 133 More stealing...
"I stole money from them." (people on his paper route)
p. 159 A homosexual exchange between Tobias and his friend Arthur...
"One night he kissed me, or I kissed him, or we kissed each other. It surprised us both. After that, we felt particularly close we turned on each other."
p. 161-165 More sexually-oriented profanity…
"What a bunch of dildos," Arthur said...
"They were good friends with the cousin of a guy who'd lost his dick in an automobile accident. He crashed his convertible into a tree and his girlfriend was thrown high up into the branches. When the police got her down they found the guy's dong in her mouth."
"While we waited in line we compared Ballard pussy with Concrete pussy..."
"Fuck the boss," Smoke said.
p. 177 Tobias's stepfather abuses him...
"Then he was on me. He caught me with one hand under the covers and the other holding the sandwich, and at first, instead of protecting myself, I jerked the sandwich away as if that was what he wanted. His open hands lashed back and forth across my face. I dropped the sandwich and covered my face with my forearm, but I couldn't keep his hands away. He was kneeling on the bed, his legs on either side of me, locking me in with the blankets. I shouted his name, but he kept hitting me in a fast convulsive rhythm and I knew he was beyond all hearing. Somehow, with no conscious intention, I pulled my other arm free and hit him in the throat. He reared back, gasping. I pushed him off the bed and kicked the covers away, but before I could get up he grabbed my hair and forced my face down hard against the mattress. Then he hit me in the back of the neck. I went rigid with shock. He tightened his grip on my hair. I waited for him to hit me again. I could hear him panting. We stayed like that for awhile. Then he pushed me away and got up. He stood over me, breathing hoarsely. "Clean up this mess," he said."
p. 185 More vulgarity...
"When Chuck tried to talk him out of going, Psycho called him a pussy."
"He loitered in the bathrooms and made fun of other boys' dicks ..."
p. 189 Yet more...
"Speak to me, dicklick,"
p. 226 and more...
"Then they talked about eating pussy."
p. 264 and more...
"I love you, Wolfman! I fucking love you!"
What do I think? I think it's fucking great, Wolfman, what do you fucking think I think?"
"This memoir is particularly valuable to freshman classes. The bulk of the writer's memoirs are mined from his adolescence, so there are plenty of opportunities for students to see themselves in Wolff's predicaments."
(Those comments were written by a Blue Valley Communication Arts teacher. To read these reviews, ask for the documentation in your school library.)
Click here to read the article, "Read it and Blush" in the 2/19/04 Sun which reported on the challenge to This Boy's Life. Sample excerpts from Blue Valley officials and parents are shown below.
"It is a real good example of a contemporary memoir...This is one that students really like and find meaning in." (Susan Swift, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services)
Copp (Nikki) said she would be comfortable allowing an eighth-grader to read the book. "It did not offend me. Quite truthfully I fell asleep reading it a couple of different times, ..." she said. "It's not pornographic. Yes, there's foul language used, but quite truthfully that is the way boys among boys will talk."(Nikki Copp, Blue Valley Board member)
"If my daughter wanted to read that book or a book similar I am perfectly OK with that," he said. (John Fuller, Blue Valley Board President)
Clint Robinson also said he thought the book was acceptable for his daughter to read in ninth grade. (Clint Robinson, Blue Valley Board member)
"At the beginning of the book when he starts using bad language, that was a concern," she said. "And it has a very negative tone. But when within two pages they use the f-word 13 times. That was a serious concern. What in the world are they using this book for with this obscene language in it?" (Concerned Blue Valley parent)
Citizen reviews for Citizens for Academic Responsibility (a community effort to keep parents in touch with their public school in Richland, Washington) also gave This Boy's Life an extremely negative review.