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This Boy's Life

Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. "Oh, Toby," my mother said, "he's lost his brakes."

The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us.

By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind....My mother put her arm around my shoulder...


For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but her guard was down and I couldn't help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded belt, beaded mocassins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle....


This extraordinary opening--from Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life"--immediately announces that the writer belongs in the company of Mary Karr. Someone who can describe the past in a way that is both compassionate and unsparing. Someone who is a survivor, and who has a sense of humor.

The opening feels mythic: We sense that Mom might be out of control, right away, because the car has boiled over "again." The idea of crossing the Continental Divide: One world has been abandoned, and a new world is beckoning. The truck like an animal: "bawling," "shimmying," laying "on its back." The truck seems to represent the wildness of Tobias's young life: It's a symbol, without seeming overly schematic.

But here's what I especially love about this passage. The kid is just as crazy as the mom. A lesser writer would create a narrator who is passive or innocent or bland. But not here. This kid is scrappy, as kids tend to be. He is just a bit manipulative. He maybe isn't as "moral" as we would like.

The kid recognizes his mother's vulnerability; he knows she is feeling solicitous because her hand reaches for his hair. A more Christlike soul might just insist on packing up and moving on. But Tobias is a kid. He knows he can score some points from the mother's vulnerability. So, with a sense of queasiness, and even against his own better judgment, he makes some demands.

And then the things he receives are so paltry: the beaded belt and mocassins, the "horse with tooled-leather saddle." The boy has imperiled his family's future--it's clear we're not sitting on piles of money here--and he has taken this risk just for some "tooled leather." I love that the adult Tobias can remember tiny details about the horse: It's bronze! Its saddle is removable! That's what being a child means: It means finding excitement in very small things.

We know we're in the company of two struggling and recognizably human fools, and we're only one page into the story. We must keep reading. We're in the hands of a master.








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