Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wolff, Tobias - John Rechy (review date 5 November 1989)

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John Rechy (review date 5 November 1989)

SOURCE: Rechy, John. “Discharging the First Duty of Life.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (5 November 1989): 12.

[In the following review, Rechy offers a positive assessment of This Boy's Life, analyzing its perspective on the nature of truth and memory.]

“Memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story,” Tobias Wolff writes in the acknowledgement page of his splendid This Boy's Life: A Memoir. But memory does not always tell a “truthful story,” and Wolff exemplifies this immediately: “… my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.” This dichotomy is extended in the book's epigraph, from that master of artifice Oscar Wilde: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.”

Life and art melded for Wilde, and all biography assumes a pose. To assert that it is possible to re-create more than...

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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