by Geoffrey Wolff
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Product Description
In this beautifully written and profoundly stirring autobiography, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of his Gatsby-esque father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love. 8 pages of black-and-white photos.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Doesn't spare his father or himself, 2008-02-25
I was interested in every single sentence. This book does what the best memoirs do, which is to allow the reader to judge the characters. For example, Wolff doesn't pretend there's anything charming about condemning a social pretender while simultaneously acting like one, but he also doesn't chicken out and preempt you by saying he was jerk for doing it.
He spent around 75% of this book trashing his dad, for good reason, yet, amazingly, I didn't want to join in. The contempt and love that the author shows for his father are both totally sincere. There are a lot of exciting, Frank Abignale-like adventures in here, but they come across as anecdotes. The real story is, will Duke, after a whole lifetime of hard work and earnest application, finally manage to TRULY disappoint his son? It takes a lot, of course.
I was also impressed with the author for exposing himself as such a snob. To be shocked by your father pretending to have graduated from college when he in fact flunked out is one thing, but for you both to be so aggrieved by the prospect of his having gone to Deerfield/Penn instead of Groton/Yale has to be a symptom of truly advanced superficiality. It can't be easy to admit to that.
Anyway, it was a great book.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 I thought this book would be thought provoking, 2007-08-29
It wasn't at all what I expected. I read the first one or two chapters and I thought to myself this book is pretty good--but the memoir fell apart after that.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant memoir of father/son relationship by brother of Tobias Wolff, 2007-02-12
I don't know how I initially ran into this book, but my son was assigned This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff in prep school - twice. This is a memoir by Tobias' brother, Geoffrey Wolff, of life with their father - a Jew who went to extreme measures to pass as not Jewish. The real story though is not the fathers' life, but the author's incredible insight into a father/son relationship. I bought this copy to give to my son's prep school - I thought it made, at least in excerpt, critical reading if they were going to thoughtlessly keep assigning This Boy's Life. Brilliant writing. It would be a shame for this to be the lost "twin" as it's so rare to get two angles on a life, so well fitted for adolescent dialog in school.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
The Sins of the Fathers, 2006-08-17
Some time ago, the American poet Robert Frost remarked in a "Paris Review" interview with Richard Poirier that "you don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular. One's a Republican, one's a Democrat. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat." Yet it cannot always be so. Consider "The Duke of Deception", a fine, gritty memoir by Geoffrey Wolff that has proven to have great staying power. In Wolff's book, we have a father who seems to have been a true Democrat of the heart, although-- or perhaps because-- his "sustaining line of work til shortly before he died was as a confidence man." And we have a mother who appears Republican in her affections.
So we have here an unusually frank family memoir. It opens on Wolff's declaration that though he loved his father , he responded to news of his death with "Thank God." He had, he said, watched his wife's brother-in-law cross the room toward him, sure that the phone call just taken concerned the death of one of his own two sons. He'd already decided which boy was lost. "I heard someone behind me gasp," Wolff wrote, after his shocking exclamation of relief. "The words did not then strike a blow above my heart," but later they did, and there was no calling them back, there is no calling them back now. All I can do is try to tell what they meant."
Wolff, former book review editor of "The Washington Post," and "Newsweek,"has created a remarkable book from this effort to tell what those words meant. Of the love:"I had this from him always: compassion, care, generosity,endurance." And the pain: his father is a floater of bad checks, a wrecker of good cars. He charges $1,000 worth of clothes to his son's accounts when the boy is an undergraduate at Princeton University.
The family moves from a small tract house in Southern California, to a mansion in Birmingham, Alabama, to a luxurious honeymoon suite in Niagara Falls, to a cold-water walkup on Manhattan's East Side.
Duke keeps the balls spinning for many years, but toward the end he loses energy. He buys a watch he doesn't need with a check for $248.70 on an account closed more than four years. He goes to jail for the third time. By then" my father looked twenty yeaars older than when I had last seen him on Nassau Street (in Princeton, N.J.) two years back. He had flabby jowls and liver spots on his bare skull. He had lost mass, taken on a pot. He moved awkwardly now, uncertainly. He wore thick-framed eyeglasses like Barry Goldwater's and his clothes-- I couldn't believe this --were on the flashy side... He seemed to have lost more than his youth. He was distracted, coarse, not very bright"....
Duke will jump bail after his son, sadly expecting that he would, refused to make it. "And he was punished," Wolff writes, when the law caught up with him. "They paid him back with interest for the space he had occupied, the airs he had put on, the fictions he had enacted. He had told me he hoped I'd never be a reviewer, a critic. I understand. Out in the real world the critics have teeth, and use them."
Perhaps Wolff kept a diary in his youth, the portraits he paints are so true and detailed. He writes with admirable crispness, and great honesty as he throws light on some of the darker corners of family life. He creates a complex picture of his father, a man difficult to grasp, by design.
"My father was a Jew," Wolff mused." This did not seem to him a good idea, and so it was his notion to disassemble his history, begin at zero, and re-create himself....If I now find his authentic history more surprising, more interesting, than his counterfeit history, he did not.He would not make peace with his actualities, and so he was the author of his own circumstances...."
The family used occasionally to visit a beach on which Duke's family had summered throughout his boyhood, but he chose not to tell his son of this. "We must have been alone on that beach twenty times, perhaps forty. And we walked each time past the house where my father spent every summer of his life, happily, until he thought he would rather be elsewhere, and was old enough to drive himself away from Crescent Beach. And never did my father tell me that we were together near a sacred family place, or point to the house...that had given his father such pleasure and pride. Of my father's serial repudiations I find this the most perverse and sad."
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Forgive, But Don't Forget, 2005-12-07
For those who have read Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception fills in many gaps. Where This Boy's Life focuses on a rather short period of a couple years in Tobias Wolff's life, The Duke of Deception covers the life of their father, Arthur. The writing style is much more formal than Toby's book. When he describes his often rocky relationship with his mother, it sounds almost like a psychologist's file than a son talking about his mother. "My mother is not cold, and she is not stiff. She has been infailingly warm and loving with my boys, and with my wife. She laughs a lot, teases, likes to be teased. But neither of us, I think, trusted the other's love" (48). The formality adds greatly to the older and wiser narrator, creating a sense of distance. It takes some getting used to, but as the book progresses, it became clearer that this formality is a way of distancing Geoffrey from some of the more painful memories.
The further you get into the book, the further you want to read on. As Geoffrey gets older and older, he begins to understand his father's cons and note them more carefully. The reader is entrapped, anxious to see when Arthur will finally exploit everyone who cares about him, and even more anxious to see how Geoffrey could possibly forgive his father. Even as Geoffrey despises his father's cons, he finds himself falling into Arthur's ways. "As I liked him less and less I became more and more like him. I felt trapped" (197).
The story's a little slow at first, filled with family history, "My father Arthur was delivered by his father Arthur at home on Spring Street in Hartford, November 22, 1907" (13). This history becomes important as Geoffrey begins to untangle his father's life. Wolff keeps the reader's attention by injecting vivid scenes from his childhood into the narration of dry facts. Overall, this book was a fantastic story of a son coming to terms with his father's crimes and then having the ability to forgive him for it.
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