More recently, after reading ''This Boy's Life'' - a book at once compassionate and deeply disturbing - she is reported by Geoffrey to have said, laconically and a bit dreamily, ''Well, I guess that's it now. When ''The Duke of Deception'' was published, Rosemary sent Geoffrey a letter correcting perhaps a hundred small errors of fact, but leaving unchallenged his memory and interpretation of events. My mother can't remember if she ever told my father where they were. Following their parents' separation (Geoffrey was 12 years old Tobias, 5) Geoffrey lived with his father, mostly on the East Coast Tobias, with his mother, out West.įrom the time he was 14 until his senior year at Princeton, Geoffrey didn't know where Tobias and his mother lived.
Ten years after the appearance of Geoffrey Wolff's ''The Duke of Deception,'' Tobias Wolff has just published his autobiographical ''This Boy's Life.'' Yet readers who anticipate split-screen, Rashomon-like views of a single family will find instead two families at very distant points on the social, economic and geographical spectrum of American domestic life - two households with seemingly nothing in common except history and blood. Not only are her two sons, Geoffrey and Tobias, both acclaimed and established writers of fiction, but both are also the authors of profoundly and painfully revelatory memoirs of childhood, of growing up. Still, what emerges quite plainly is the possibility that, among mothers, Rosemary Loftus Wolff may be uniquely blessed and afflicted. She picks herself up and dusts herself off, and here comes the train about to back over her.'' ''Here's this woman - she's been written about once. His mother, he says, is remarkably gritty, resilient. Now, as he sits beneath it, talking about his mother, what's striking is how closely the spirit of the painting resembles that of the woman he is describing. Wolff refers to the painting as a ''generic ancestor portrait'' whose subject's ''knowing smirk'' has often made him wish that she were in fact a relative. ON THE WALL OF GEOFFREY WOLFF'S JAMESTOWN, R.I., living room is an early American portrait of a Colonial matron whose half-smile suggests, improbably, a flinty New England Mona Lisa.
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