A Day at the Beach: Recollections

With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family.

He shares with us, then, the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together -- with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Nine autobiographical essays by novelist Wolff (The Final Club, 1990, etc.), whose own early-life adventures would make Tom Jones blanch. Those who have read Wolff's memoir of life with his father, The Duke of Deception (1979), will know this territory pretty well: the author's outlandish childhood (played out from week to week in cold-water flats, debutante balls, jazz clubs, and stolen cars); his con-man father; his Choate-and-Princeton years--all of which were given longer and better play in the earlier telling. Still, while some of the new essays are warmed-over Duke, most of them pick up where that story was left off. Wolff's first job out of Princeton--teaching English at an American prep school in Istanbul- -provides the basis for the best piece here (and, one hopes, for Wolff's next novel), and his reconstruction of how he abandoned academic life for a career in journalism and writing (``Apprentice'') is both wry and moving. The voltage drops significantly toward book's end, however, when Wolff tries (in ``Matterhorn'' and ``Waterway'') to tell us more than we need to know about his midlife crisis, and rambles on to no discernible or interesting end. Wolff's eye is unfailingly sharp and his descriptions remarkable and glib. When he keeps to his subject, he can be mesmerizing, but he tends to wander into uncharted waters, where he frequently gets lost. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.