The Last Flight of Poxl West: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015:The Last Flight of Poxl West is a memoir within a memoir within a novel. In other words, it tells the fictional story of a late 20th century teenage boy, Elijah Goldstein, who recounts the story of his uncle, Poxl West, who wrote a memoir about his years as an RAF pilot during WWII. (Poxl’s manuscript makes up half the book.) The way I said that, it sounds confusing. The way Torday wrote it, it’s perfectly clear: this is a story about a boy who loves his uncle who has for fifty years portrayed himself as a war hero, has in fact gotten famous for being a war hero (and writing about it) and who may or may not have been all the things he (and the boy) thought he was. It’s like two coming-of-age stories in one, in other words, and a wise and generous meditation on memory and aspiration and truth. Poxl himself (It’s a diminutive of a Czech name; the West was Anglicized from “Weisberg”) is like a John Irving character reimagined by Philip Roth – and Elijah, well, Elijah is every baseball-loving-son-of-immigrant-Jewish-parents you ever met in school. Not clichéd, just familiar. But if the characters are achingly, irresistibly familiar, the novel Torday has written about them is unusual and impressive; it’s a rollicking joy ride that leaves you breathlessly excited and a little sad, all at once. --Sara Nelson