Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy - Hardcover

Suleri Goodyear, Sara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226304019 ISBN 13: 9780226304014

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Synopsis

Sara Suleri Goodyear's Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, Meatless Days intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with Suleri Goodyear's most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his "patriotic and preposterous" disposition).

Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear's upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also "preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space," a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father's inalienable right to oppress his children.

Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: "On Judgment Day," he told his daughter, "I will say to God, 'Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'"

About this title

About the Author

Sara Suleri Goodyear (1953-2022), born Sara Suleri, was professor emeritus of English at Yale University, where her fields of study and teaching included Romantic and Victorian poetry, postcolonial literature and theory, and contemporary cultural criticism. She was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism and served on the editorial boards of that journal as well as The Yale Review and Transition.

From the Inside Flap

Sara Suleri Goodyear's Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, Meatless Days intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with Suleri Goodyear's most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his "patriotic and preposterous" disposition).

Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear's upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also "preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space," a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father's inalienable right to oppress his children.

Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: "On Judgment Day," he told his daughter, "I will say to God, 'Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'"

Reviews

Goodyear, a Yale English professor, wrote Meatless Days in tribute to her mother; Boys Will Be Boys, a title her father had wanted to use for his own autobiography, is intended as an elegy to her dad. In these 15 brief chapters, readers will discover little about this man nicknamed "Pip" (for "patriotic and preposterous") other than tidbits about his irascible nature. Indeed, there's little thematic coherence in this narrative; one thought simply leads to another. Goodyear's rather posturing prose style doesn't help. Her sister has "quite insequentially" put curlers in her hair. Her father, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, "tended the chide us before we should be chidden" and "had much love inside him, in some extraneous fashion." When her father fidgets at hearing her poems, she comments, "Perhaps there was another martial law in the offering, which is, on a civic level, yet a variant on the mode of translation." Readers expecting cultural sensitivity from this Pakistani-born academic may find some of her language off-putting-referring to one of her students as "of Japanese extraction"-as is her attitude toward the student herself. Goodyear does write about the family pets, favorite childhood foods, the step-sister she hated, her memories of Lahore, how she met her husband, her weariness with academic conferences, the wiles of assorted relatives and even her feelings about Pakistani Tampax. Any or all of these topics might have been interesting, if only she had found a way to let the reader care about them.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226304019
• ISBN 13: 9780226304014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136