The four best memoirs I have ever read, and I have read too many, are Frank McCort’s, Angela’s Ashes, “Tobias Wolff’s, “This Boy’s Life,” Geoffrey Wolff’s, “The Duke of Deception,” and Jeanette Walls, “The Glass Castle.”These books are similar in describing horrendous childhood’s of upheaval and instability, complicated by mentally ill, vagabond, eccentric parents, and a sort of lower middle class poverty. (I know that’s an oxymoron, read the books and you’ll understand). But the similarities go much further and deeper. Each author is a brilliant writer with an uncanny ability to recount his or her traumatic childhoods without self-pity. They don’t seem to hold resentment towards their incompetent parents. In fact they are able to recognize the strengths in their parent’s oddity and the positive aspects of their personalities. They find in their chaotic childhood experience, grist for creative tour-de-forces, in each of these four memoirs.Please see prior review of “Glass Castle”. I will review “Angela’s Ashes,” soon.Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff are brothers. Geoffrey is eight years older than Tobias. When their parents divorce, Geoffrey heads off to live with his father and Tobias goes with his mother.Arthur Wolff was a Yalie, fighter pilot, and ersatz aviation engineer, who was also a vagabond, con-man, flim-flam-man, forger and alcoholic. In the “”The Duke of Deception,” Geoffrey describes his chaotic life with his crazy father who bilks and cons everyone he meets, including friends, associates, wives, and Geoffrey himself. They move from place to place in continuous flight from debtors and jail. (They end up in La Jolla, where I was born and living at the time, with my father named Arthur and brother named Jeffrey.) Arthur forges credentials and lands a job as an aeronautical engineer at General Dynamics, where my friends parents worked at the time. Eventually Arthur is committed to a mental hospital and Geoffrey heads off to Princeton.Geoffrey’s descriptions of his father are brilliantly nuanced, remarkably sympathetic, and psychologically insightful. He says for example, ”As I dislike him more and more. I become more and more like him. I felt trapped.” This is a remarkable statement. As a therapist, one of the most difficult things to get across to people is the concept that without significant insight and effort, one tends to possess the very aspects of their own parents that they most despise. Geoffrey masters this in three short sentences.Tobias Wolff’s book starts in 1955 with ten year old Tobias, fleeing in a Nash Rambler that was continuously boiling over, with his mother, who was leaving one of a series of continuously violent relationships. They were driving from Florida to Utah and had broken down once again on the top of the Continental Divide, when a semi looses it’s brakes, screams it’s air horn in one long wail, and flies off the divide with Tobias and his mother watching. Tobias’s mother was moving to Florida to strike it rich mining uranium.So starts Tobias’s memoir. Honestly, I don’t understand the appeal of fiction as much anymore, when non-fiction is so much weirder, more incredible, and far more interesting. Tobias eventually ends up living in a town called Concrete (Washington) with a concrete, blockhead of a stepfather who was a sadistic, martinet. Eventually he escapes all this chaos into the relatively more predictable Vietnam War and training in the special forces. (He wrote a great book about his tour of duty entitled, “In the Pharaoh’s Army: Memoirs of the Lost War.)Tobias and Geoffrey meet up once, after a six-year separation in La Jolla, just before Geoffrey leaves for Princeton, after their father is institutionalized. Tobias comes out by bus. Geoffrey spends the summer writing technical manuals for General Dynamic’s under his father’s name, while assigning Tobias daily reading requirements of all the Greek tragedies. I was younger at this time swimming at Windansea, right next to where they lived.Geoffrey eventually goes on to receive his Ph.D. in literature, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a Professor of Literature at University of California Irvine. He has published numerous highly acclaimed books. He had two sons and married a Clinical Social Worker. (I am a Clinical Social Worker. Weird coincidences). Tobias studied at Oxford, received his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at Stanford and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford. He also has written many highly acclaimed books. He is married and has three children. A movie was made of the book, “This Boy’s Life,” starring Leonardo What’s His Name. Their mother eventually became President of the League of Women Voters. Truth is stranger than fiction.The relationship between the brothers remained close and mutually supportive since their time together in La Jolla. Both are considered two of America’s finest contemporary writers.It is remarkable and comforting to realize that all four of these authors overcame childhood’s of shocking hardship and trauma, and used their experiences to write creative, beautiful, and inspiring memoirs.Highly recommend all four of these books. Recommend you read them in chronological order starting with “Angela’s Ashes,” then “The Duke of Deception,” “This Boys Life,” and “The Glass Castle.” (Toss in Pharaoh’s Army and you’ll be glad you did!)Happy Reading!
I am reading or re-reading a lot of father-son books I have had on my shelf for a long time, in part because I am working on a father-son project of my own. But my relationship with my father was good; why is it I keep reading these sad/tragic stories of compulsive liar fathers by their damaged kids? Mary Karr's The Liars Club, Laurie Sandell's The Imposter Syndrome, Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, so many others, and just recently, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff (one of my favorite writers) and now Woolf's brother's memoir, The Duke of Deception. I guess the stories are fascinating…. but why is t we are so fascinated, and even somewhat attracted to scam or film flam or con artists, impostors, liars? I'm not sure. They make for a good story, I guess. Part of my attraction might be this: my wife hates The Great Gatsby because she finds him and the whole cast of rich and spooled characters despicable. But I care for Gatsby, and don't think of him as merely pathetic. He strives, he goes for even a very flawed American Dream of material worth, and I hate that, but there's something in the striving that I admire. I love The Great Gatsby as one of the Great American Novels. And some reviews speak of Duke as Gatsby-like, and in his having to have the best of everything, I can see it. But I never come to see him in the same light. Maybe Geoffrey is not as believable Nick Carraway as I'd like; he's too deeply flawed himself. (But this would be a good book to read with Gatsby, though! Both are pretenders, liars.)When the Duke (Arthur) and Rosemary divorce, due to the Duke's crazy lying tragic-comic financial disasters, Duke gets Geoff and Rosemary gets Toby. Both have chaotic tales of family dysfunction. Toby gets mean and violently psychotic step-Dads and very little money as her Mom makes bad choice after bad choice in men, and Geoff gets outrageous dad Duke who makes terrible life choices in general. The brothers did not see each other for many years, though they get together in each other's books near the end. The two memoirs have in common Duke and Mom, but not as much Dad in Toby's, not as much Mom in Geoff's, obviously. They both identify Mom as nicer but also making wild choices, and never really in love with the crazy Duke. Dad is nailed as compulsive liar in both.Toby's is in my opinion much better, as it puts you in the room, with some painful detail,. He's just a better writer in general, and makes of himself a more sympathetic character. We don't get the complete arc and all the details of his life; he evokes the insanity of his broken life, always with some humor and self-deprecation. Geoff tells a more conventional memoir, documenting with great detail the fake resumes and application letters and unpaid bills and opulent lifestyle based on sand, and because of the detail it becomes less interesting to me. All right already, I say later in the book, as the Duke's lies finally really catch up with him.One of the interesting things about this book is that Geoff essentially becomes the arrogant, greedy asshole that was the Duke. A player that everyone liked; Geoff makes it clear he learned how to be the Duke, though he also is liked far less, and less likeable. At one point when the Duke is really in decline Geoff says that the Duke watched television every night as HE, Geoff, wrote a novel! He REALLY went to Princeton, instead of the Yale lie his Dad told! Good for you, Geoffrey boy! Then, when his Dad is really out of it, he sends Daddy dearest his novel Bad Debts that essentially excoriates the Duke, and wonders why is Dad never responds! The last communication with his Dad is to send him this, with a letter hoping he doesn't take it too hard! And when the Duke dies, and he hears about it, his first reaction is "That's good" (in part he was afraid the call was maybe about one of his own sons dead from an accident, but still…the Duke had really taken care of his son, for the most part. Geoff sums Duke up deftly, after almost three hundred pages of misery: "He was all lies and love." In this memoir Geoff finally comes to terms with the fact that he loved his father and his father loved him, and raised him with the intention of raising an honest, upright citizen… but the Duke's own modeling was the greater teacher. We are supposed to be moved by the sight of Geoffrey getting into bed with his sleeping son and cuddling him, at the end of the book, but I'm not convinced he is now going to be this great Dad, this wonderful person. He's been an asshole throughout his whole memoir, a privileged person who, like his Dad, faked his way through life, caring more about material possessions than people, and pretending to the people who catch him in the act that he has "learned" (vs. the Duke who says, "never explain, never apologize." . If I got a great sense he had really seen himself all the way through in the way he claims to really see his flawed Dad, I might be more sympathetic. Still, it is quite a story, this two book set of memoirs, and this is memorable, and really well written.. just not as artfully written or as insightful as Toby's.
What do You think about The Duke Of Deception (1990)?
Stephen Dubner mentioned this book on the Freakonomics blog as one of his favorite father-son stories. He mentioned Geoffrey is the brother of Tobias, who sits on my favorite authors list (only 2 authors long). I had Books Inc specially order it for me, since it doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere.Fantastic! I read This Boys’ Life a number of years ago. For those that don’t know, Toby and Geoff are about 10 years apart and each was raised by one parent after the parents divorced. Each book is phenomonal as a standalone, but together, it is incredibly interesting to see the makeup of the two halves of this family.
—zan
While his brother Toby's memoir was emotional and moving, his older brother remains intellectually distant and mordantly ironic, even angier than Toby, yet it shed s an empathetic light on Toby's problems. What I like was that Goeffrey allows the reader to gradually realize that he was becoming the dopopleganger of his father but finally matures, admits this, and changes his life for the better. Although sometimes disconnectedly cerebral, Geoffrey does deliver the emotional climax at the tragic ending. Pain, whether derrived from war or family discord, often creates the extreme conditions that produce accomplished writing.
—Kevin
This book -- often beautiful in its prose, often unpleasant in its subject matter -- troubles me. It provided a unique counterpoint: it includes a new perspective on one of my favorite memoirs, the author's brother Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989). One of the best elements of that book was its willingness not to moralize, to trust that we readers would see the irony develop, understand the unreliable characters' unreliability, and internalize a healthy judgment of the immorality we were observing.This book, focused more on a different family dynamic within the same family, I found much more unsettling. On the one hand, there were the human flaws: Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff's father, Arthur "Duke" Wolff, seems to have passed them to his boys as if by blood, although it's clear that nurture also played a role. On the other hand, there was love: Geoffrey Wolff perceived it -- at least occasionally -- through the haze of misbehavior and irresponsibility that his father spewed out of a life ill-lived (but oh-so-robustly so!). It was beyond odd to see the same bad behavior repeated across the family, even as they lived apart. The promises to change, unfulfilled; the pretensions and delusions; the reactions to bad parenting, at least some of which are understandable if not warranted; the fraudulent application to private schools; the prodigious talents mixed sourly with flawed character. The things that Tobias Wolff's book somehow made approachable and moral even in their wrongness are very similar to the things that Geoffrey Wolff's book reveals as alien, even nauseating. Why did I react so differently to the two memoirs?Both Wolffs are talented wordsmiths; Tobias seems the more restrained. That isn't the issue. It occurs to me that perhaps context is at work here. The poverty (while hardly Dickensian) and lack of power that Tobias -- a child, with his mother -- encountered worked on my sympathy. The profligacy and status that made Duke and Geoffrey's situation a romp, almost Fitzgerald-like, inclined me to be much less favorably inclined toward them. An adult male, raised in wealth, given all the advantages of knowing the keys to power in society, incited none of my sympathy. Duke was sympathetic only insofar as he showed love and respect, but his narcissism, recounted in episode after episode, became almost intolerable. When Geoffrey, Duke's son, misbehaved, it was occasionally amusing but usually cloying; when Tobias, Rosemary's son, misbehaved, it was a victim acting out.While both memoirs use an effective episodic structure, Tobias Wolff is more judicious in focusing on fewer threads and returning to them in a surgical way. Geoffrey's litany of Duke's (and later his own) acts benefits and then eventually suffers from the overwhelming proliferation of craziness. It was numbing.A telling exchange from the end of ch.21, starts with the fully repulsive Duke in jail, while his adult son tries to figure out how to balance an obligation to his family with a need to protect his own interest from the narcissist parent. Geoffrey is trying to make sense of Duke's most recent act of taking advantage of people simply because they could be taken advantage of:I asked my father if the story I had just heard was true. He shrugged. I asked again, and again he shrugged. "Never explain, never apologize"; he liked to say that. I told him that what he had done was wrong. I had many times suggested such things to him with sullenness and despairing sighs, but I had never before directly charged him with doing wrong. When I told my father that what he had done was wrong he stared at me, as though I had at last truly puzzled him."Don't you understand me at all?" he asked. "Do you think I care what they think is wrong?"...I yelled at my father through the mesh. Would he appear in court if I stood bail for him? I explained to him the bind I was in, the bind he had put me in. He did not seem sympathetic. Like the bondsman, he did not seem interested in the delicate character of my choice. I asked him bluntly: If I went to the edge for him, would he promise to come to court? He would promise nothing. He said I should do as I pleased, that he owed me no promises, he owed me nothing. (254)A fascinating scene, and one of my favorites in the book. Wolff matter-of-factly says that he did not bail out his father, and nobody -- not even Duke himself -- could have blamed him. Like his younger brother, the moral character of the book is not in explicit judgment but in the revelation of tense scenes that the reader cannot help but react to, then parse.Duke is one of the least likeable of characters in all of literature (in this case, literary nonfiction, of course). Even the horrifying Dwight, Tobias's abusive and brutish stepfather, earned more of my sympathy, and that's really saying something. I can't blame Geoffrey Wolff for telling the story of an unpleasant person and tiring me with it. He tells it with considerable intelligence and vigor, and as much love as can be expected. It feels a bit unfair for me to compare the brothers' books and find the less excellent one wanting, but that's how this played out. I wonder only if I would have felt differently had I read Duke of Deception before This Boy's Life.
—Carl
