Little Boy Blues: A Memoir (Vintage)

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.