Little Boy Blues: A Memoir

From one of our most astute cultural observers, a piercing memoir about a family’s breakup and the need simultaneously to embrace and distance ourselves from the people and events that shape us.
 
North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s:  A child surrounded mostly by grandparents, aunts, and uncles born in the previous century, Malcolm Jones finds himself underfoot in a disintegrating marriage. His father is charming but careless about steady work, often gone from home and often drunk. His mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clings to the past while hungering for respectability and stability. Jones vividly describes their faltering marriage as it plays out against larger cracks in society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He also recalls idyllic times and the ordinary, easy moments of an otherwise fraught childhood: discovering an old Victrola, attending a marionette show—experiences that offer a portal to other worlds.
 
Richly evoking a time and place with rare depth of feeling and a penetrating, often bittersweet candor, Malcolm Jones gives us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.

From one of our most astute cultural observers, a piercing memoir about a family’s breakup and the need simultaneously to embrace and distance ourselves from the people and events that shape us.
 
North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s:  A child surrounded mostly by grandparents, aunts, and uncles born in the previous century, Malcolm Jones finds himself underfoot in a disintegrating marriage. His father is charming but careless about steady work, often gone from home and often drunk. His mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clings to the past while hungering for respectability and stability. Jones vividly describes their faltering marriage as it plays out against larger cracks in society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He also recalls idyllic times and the ordinary, easy moments of an otherwise fraught childhood: discovering an old Victrola, attending a marionette show—experiences that offer a portal to other worlds.
 
Richly evoking a time and place with rare depth of feeling and a penetrating, often bittersweet candor, Malcolm Jones gives us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.


From the Hardcover edition.

Publishers Weekly

Jones, a veteran cultural reporter for Newsweek, writes with muted confidence about his difficult childhood, during which the emotional ups and downs of his mostly-single mom seemed monumental, and his undependable, alcoholic father kept him in a state of disorientation. This at-times touching self-portrait depicts a quiet, quirky, self-contained little boy suffering quietly while surrounded by indulging elderly relatives, as well as a mother who hides her disappointment with a middle-class sense of superiority. Unfortunately, little happens in this memoir beyond a taboo-broaching divorce, and Jones fails to make anything significant out of everyday moments of love and tension; curiously, the prospect of engaging the big cultural issues, when it arises, is often set aside. (Though Jones grew up in the South during the turbulent 1950s, he tidily encapsulates "race and bigotry": "they were everywhere and nowhere, like an odorless, tasteless gas"; similarly, religion to him was "as water is to a fish.") Though admirably straightforward, Jones's portrayal is so flat as to give readers little to hold onto. 22 b&w photos.
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Malcolm Jones has written features, reviews, and essays for Newsweek’s culture section since 1989. Prior to that he was a newspaper reporter in North Carolina and Florida. He lives with his family in the Hudson River Valley.