Little Boy Blues: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Malcolm Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 2010

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Guest Reviewer: Elizabeth Kostova

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international bestsellers The Historian and The Swan Thieves. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.

Little Boy Blues, Malcolm Jones’ elegant, poignant riff on his North Carolina childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, is actually much more than a memoir.

Moving with grace and irony between the personal and the social, it traces a boy’s growing consciousness of family traditions and conflicts, race relations, music, religion, and a mid-south landscape--a landscape that has by now collapsed into the ground with many of the old houses in which such lives were once played out. Jones grew up mainly near Winston-Salem, with forays into South Carolina. He also grew up the only child of an ultimately single--and frequently bitter--mother, a bright, hardworking woman who hungered for respectability for her small family. At the heart of his story, rendered with humor, painful honesty, and compassion, stands an often-anguished bond between mother and son.

Malcolm Jones doesn’t let his examination rest there, however. The beauty of the book lies in his ability to give small specificities an understated greater meaning: he touches on the liberation provided him by music, for example, in his meticulous rendering of the scratched-up shellac record that introduced him to the blues: “. . .the crackling hiss on its surface told me that someone had played it a lot.” A child surrounded by adults and their mysteries, the young Jones seems to have been as keen an observer as the older one, spectator in a world where manners and prayers were exhaustively taught but the obvious pain of adult lives never explained.

I might as well confess here that I’ve ruined my copy of this book by turning down the corners of too many pages I found myself rereading on the spot. I’ve also ordered plenty more to give to friends of three generations. Little Boy Blues is already among my favorite American memoirs, member of an elite line-up. I don’t know what plans Malcolm Jones has for a second such reminiscence, but I devoutly hope there will be one.

From 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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (January 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307377725
• ISBN-13: 978-0307377722
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,242,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Malcolm Jones was born January 8, 1952 in Lancaster, S.C., the only child of Malcolm Jones Sr. and Margaret Floyd Jones, with whom he moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., when he was two. When he was 12 years old, his parents divorced, and thereafter he lived with his mother until he went to college, first in Florida and then back in North Carolina, where he graduated from Wake Forest University with a BA in 1974.

While still in college, he went to work for the Winston-Salem Journal, starting as an intern writing obituaries and then as a part-time reporter. For the next decade, he worked at several North Carolina newspapers--the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, the Morning Herald in Durham and the Daily News in Greensboro. For all those papers he wrote editorials, feature stories and book reviews. In 1983, he moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., where he created the book section for the St. Petersburg Times. In 1984, he collaborated with the song writer and composer Van Dyke Parks and the artist Barry Moser on "Jump!," a retelling of several Brer Rabbit stories. In 1989, he took a job writing book reviews and other stories in the arts and culture section of Newsweek, where he has worked ever since.

In 1987, he married Robin Lawrence, with whom he has two children, Susannah and Spencer. They live in Croton, N.Y., a small town on the Hudson River not far from New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgic, Beautifully Written Depiction of A Time and Class Consciousness in the South, May 1, 2010

By 

N. Hartzog "catmommy" (Birmingham, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Little Boy Blues: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I loved this book. Jones depiction of his family's class distinction reminded me very vividly of similiar ideas and ideals that were a part of my own heritage growing up during the same years and slightly earlier in the South. Although I grew up in Alabama,not North Carolina, the same attitudes existed within my own family. I did not connect with the experience of having an alcoholic father nor a divorce between my parents but I can relate to the attitudes espoused by his mother and her family with regard to the patronizing of black people, an emphasis on class distinction, and expectations generally held for the younger (my) generation.

I had to laugh when he mentioned "hydrophobia," a word I haven't heard since my childhood. I believe it means rabies. I can recall riding on the bus with my grandmother as a child. She would intently observe passengers and direct my attention to women with thick ankles. "That's a sign of poor breeding," she would tell me. "It is an indication that they came from a lower class of people. People of refinement have slender ankles."

Poor English was a dead giveaway of class status as were a lack of manners and the wearing of too much jewelry. When grandmother saw a woman ostentatiously draped in too much jewelry she would remark, "people like that look as if they are wearing all the jewelry they possess at one time." I was taught to address my mother as "mother," and my grandparents as "grandmother and grandfather." It was acceptable to call my father "daddy." I was corrected when I said, "I'm gonna," and told that I should say "going to." "Can" meant I could if I was able and "may" was to ask permission. There was no end to learning proper decorum and walking, sitting and talking in an appropriate manner.

Jones' book brought back many buried memories for me of a time that in many ways (but not all) I wish still existed.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, poignant, July 24, 2011

By 

booklover150 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Little Boy Blues: A Memoir (Vintage) (Paperback)

I don't know how the Publisher's Weekly reviewer came up with his/her review. Did they read the same book as I did? This book has left an indelible impression on me. I wanted to start over as soon as I read the last page. A gorgeous book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Childhood Memories through a Writer's Mature Eyes, August 7, 2010

By 

Stan Sholar (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Little Boy Blues: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Malcolm Jones has captured vivid insights into his childhood, with all of its pains and pleasures. He remembers and recounts many vignettes that are similar to those experienced by most of us. However, Malcolm puts them in a profound perspective that is both entertaining and enlightening to me as I think they would be to many. Having grown up in this same neighborhood of the south in the 40's-50's, I personally related to much. Like Malcolm, I migrated out of the South for most of my life and share with him the things that I miss, but also the things that remain challenging and will take more generations to solve. On a very personal basis, Malcolm opens up to sharing many experiences involving his father, whom I knew well. The interplay of loving family members, who faced difficulties in their own unique ways is inspirational when provided the insight that is deep and searching. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this style of writing that connected so well, which is so different from his talents displayed on the pages of Newsweek's A&E columns, yet equally rewarding in a unique way.