Little Boy Blues

January 11, 2010
Jones, a veteran cultural reporter for Newsweek, writes with muted confidence about his difficult childhood, during which the emotional ups and downs of his mostly-single mom seemed monumental, and his undependable, alcoholic father kept him in a state of disorientation. This at-times touching self-portrait depicts a quiet, quirky, self-contained little boy suffering quietly while surrounded by indulging elderly relatives, as well as a mother who hides her disappointment with a middle-class sense of superiority. Unfortunately, little happens in this memoir beyond a taboo-broaching divorce, and Jones fails to make anything significant out of everyday moments of love and tension; curiously, the prospect of engaging the big cultural issues, when it arises, is often set aside. (Though Jones grew up in the South during the turbulent 1950s, he tidily encapsulates "race and bigotry": "they were everywhere and nowhere, like an odorless, tasteless gas"; similarly, religion to him was "as water is to a fish.") Though admirably straightforward, Jones's portrayal is so flat as to give readers little to hold onto. 22 b&w photos.

November 1, 2009
A cultural critic for Newsweek recalls his Southern boyhood in a fractured family.

At times reminiscent of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989), Jones's memoir describes an eccentric but loving mother, an alcoholic and passively abusive father and a peripatetic childhood. His late mother, a fifth-grade schoolteacher who spent her summers studying to update her teaching certificate, emerges as a strong woman bound by the procrustean mores of the South and by her conventional ideas about decorum, religion, family and status. Jones spends much of the book trying to understand her, a quest complicated by her Alzheimer's, which isolated her even more in old age. Though mother and son had been very close in his boyhood, his adolescence lowered between them a transparent curtain of misunderstanding. Jones recalls, sometimes in astonishing detail, pivotal experiences of his early childhood. He relives his passion for marionettes, and abrupt abandonment of them when he lost an elementary-school talent contest to some lip-synchers; his love of the movies (he adored Lawrence of Arabia) and the family's hand-crank Victrola; his despair about piano lessons (he loved the instrument, which his mother played well, but hated practicing); and his growing skepticism about religion. Jones confesses frustration about his father's story. A charming but dissolute and laconic man who seems to have wandered out of a Tennessee Williams play, the elder Jones struggled with private demons that made it impossible for him to hold a job for long and resulted in continual abandonment and an eventual divorce that devastated the author's mother. Jones ends with a lovely section about family photographs. Occasionally, the author tests readers' credulity with long passages of verbatim dialogue from his preschool years.

Fragrant with wistfulness and poignant with regret.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 21, 2010
Newsweek culture columnist Jones offers a poignant account, cum photos, of his insular life as an only child in a broken family. While this is hardly unique, Jones wields a skillful immediacy in describing his tense, overwrought mother; his affable alcoholic, absentee father; and his otherwise innocuous but peculiar, family. Much of the book chronicles Jones's youthful efforts to secure his mother's approbation. Ultimately, the author journeys south for his mother's funeral and struggles to understand better her-and himself. Excellent literary memoir. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]-Lynne C. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Newsweek critic Jones dwells upon his childhood and adolescence in this subdued but keenly observed memoir of growing up in 1950s and 60s North Carolina. The expected fireworks are absenttheres no abuse, no fantastic blowups, no premature life of crime. Instead, its the roughly chronological tale of Jones mother, a southern woman made increasingly spiteful by the long absences of her husband, a lackadaisical journeyman given to drink. Cornered by his mothers rules and indulged by an endless stream of relatives, Jones grows up sensitive and frightened. This is brought to life most vividly with his collection of marionettes, which quickly turn into burdens of performance (entertaining his mother) and defense (having to rebuff the accusation that he plays with dolls). But its movies that were my way out of the narrow world I grew up in. Epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind draw sharp contrast to the mediocrity of his familys existence. Its a scrutiny some will find unwarranted, though even they wont be able to deny Jones striking recall.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)