The Boys and Their Baby

March 1, 1988
The evocation of San Francisco's ambience is the best thing about this sometimes perceptive, sometimes irritating first novel. Wolff blatantly tags his characters with symbolic names: Adam (the innocent first man) comes to California to teach English in a private school and moves in with his erstwhile Yale roommate Huck (as in Finn) and Huck's adorable baby boy, Christopher, whose presence will indeed redeem all the characters as they move from guilt to penance and redemption. The mother-dominated Adam, so unwordly he is almost a wimp, is overwhelmed by San Francisco's sophistication, its joie de vivre that coexists with an earthquake mentality. He is introduced to Huck's friends: the chanteuse Lucille, who becomes his lover; a gay duo, Timmy and Tommy, who live upstairs; the five students in his class at the Stringfellow School, all of whom are less naive than he; and another former Yale classmate and fellow teacher, Amy Armstrong, with whom he also begins an affair. Questions about fidelity and responsibility, musings about the validity of structuralist criticism (Adam's mother is a noted professor in the field) and the violation of taboos mingle with genuinely appealing scenes of domesticity. But the story is fuzzy and unfocused, and the central eventthe arrival of Christopher's mentally unbalanced motheris foreshadowed with so heavy a hand that suspense is nil. While intelligently written, in the end this novel about "boys who are somehow not quite men and men who are still somehow little boys'' offers more promise than satisfaction.

March 15, 1988
When Adam gets a job teaching in San Francisco, he moves from Boston to live with his former college roommate Huck (with whom he has had no contact for ten years) and Huck's year-old baby, Christopher. There he has simultaneous affairs with two women and is amorously pursued by a male student. He participates willingly in the care of the baby and comes to a climactic confrontation with the baby's mentally ill mother. Like Armistead Maupin's San Francisco, Wolff's is rich in intriguing locations, situations, and characters of varying ages, sexes, sexual orientations, and lifestyles. A first novel, by turns humorous and introspective, this portends well for future works. James E. Cook, Dayton & Montgomery Cty. P.L., Ohio

Copyright 1988 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.