Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a young boy with a penchant for troublemaking. Toby (though he now likes to call himself "Jack" after the author Jack London) just needs a little guidance in his life. Or at least that’s what his single mother thinks when she moves to Seattle, hoping to begin a new life in the 1950s. But even a move across the country can’t prevent Toby from wreaking a bit of adolescent havoc – destroying cars, defacing public property, shoplifting. It’s especially when he meets his mother’s new boyfriend, Dwight, that things begin to get truly out of hand.
Personality… spry, youthful, and carefree. Many people think of Toby as a ne’er-do-well, but he has a large heart buried beneath his rabble-rousing. He has a gift for seeing directly into the true selves of others, and he especially does so with Dwight, whose outwardly friendly smile turns out to be as phony as Toby suspects.
Get to Know him in...
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In 1957, a son and mother flee the East and an abusive boyfriend to find a new life, and end up in Seattle, where the mother meets a polite garage mechanic. The boy continually gets into trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd. The mom marries the mechanic, but they soon find out that he's an abusive and unreasoning alcoholic, and they struggle to maintain hope in an impossible situation as the boy grows up with plans to escape the small town by any means possible. Based on a true story by Tobias Wolff.
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This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.
