Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wolff, Tobias - Jay Rogoff (review date summer 1996)

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Jay Rogoff (review date summer 1996)

SOURCE: Rogoff, Jay. “Novel Truths and Memory Games.” Shenandoah 46, no. 2 (summer 1996): 99-102.

[In the following review, Rogoff argues that In Pharaoh's Army is a honest and complex memoir, praising its style and technique.]

Tobias Wolff's 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, began with a terrible accident: past the overheating car in which young Toby and his mother drive to Utah, a truck without brakes barrels downhill and soon reappears in a ravine at the bottom of a cliff. That accident seemed so cinematic and such a perfect emblem of that book's disasters and close calls, that it is bewildering why Michael Caton-Jones didn't open his film adaptation with it.

Wolff's new Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, also begins with a traffic disaster, but one in which Wolff plays a more active role:

Some peasants were blocking the road...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Valentine Cunningham (review date 14 March 1975)
   2. Bruce Allen (review date spring 1982)
   3. Richard Orodenker and Welch D. Everman (review date June 1982)
   4. Dean Flower (review date summer 1982)
   5. Bruce Allen (review date 7 June 1985)
   6. Thomas DePietro (review date autumn 1986)
   7. Linda Taylor (review date 6-12 November 1987)
   8. Richard Eder (review date 8 January 1989)
   9. Jeff Danziger (review date 16 February 1989)
   10. Geoff Dyer (review date 28 April 1989)
   11. John Clute (review date 12-18 May 1989)
   12. John Rechy (review date 5 November 1989)
   13. Peter J. Bailey (essay date summer 1991)
   14. John F. Desmond (essay date 14 May 1994)
   15. Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1994)
   16. Tobias Wolff and Nicholas A. Basbanes (interview date 24 October 1994)
   17. James Hannah (essay date 21 November 1994)
   18. Amanda Hopkinson (review date 9 December 1994)
   19. Michael Wood (review date 23 December 1994)
   20. Michael O. Garvey (review date 19 May 1995)
   21. Pat C. Hoy II (review date summer 1995)
   22. Jay Rogoff (review date summer 1996)
   23. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   24. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   25. Erin McGraw (review date summer 1997)
   26. Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)
   27. Daniel D. Challener (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright