Richard Hoffman (1)

Richard Hoffman grew up Catholic in a working class neighborhood and family. But his life story of course differs radically from mine, and he has managed to explore his story through writing. Hoffman offers this second memoir (haven't read the first but I intend to get a copy and read it) as a reflection of his past and his present, as his thoughts on families and as his thoughts on surviving. The large and small parallels I found in his life will differ from those found by other readers, but I think Hoffman's individual story overlaps with many of our stories.… (mais)

Italian critic, writer, filmmaker poet and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini said an author cannot ventriloquize outside his own social class. What Richard Hoffman does iso well, over and over is to shine the light on his particular class: white, Catholic, American academic from an East Coast mill-town working class family who was sexually abused as a child by an athletic coach, whose long-suffering mother smoked too many cigarettes, whose father, after retirement, ended up sitting in soft chair watching TV all day “because he earned the right to do it. “

Rhetorically and stylistically Hoffman’s exceptional memoir paints the picture of the landscapes in which the people who he loves enter and exit. The people are his immediate family--wife daughter and son, living in North Cambridge, Massachusetts; his family of origin-- father mother, brothers, in Allentown, Pennsylvania; and the struggles of his daughter, her child and black boyfriend who are trying to carve a place for themselves and meanwhile crowd into the small North Cambridge house with Hoffman and his wife, who is also a working-class academic, and who, at one point in the memoir, has to deal with cancer.

Hoffman elegantly writes that no matter who we are, we are all here for a brief season of seasons that we have no name for. “Life” is too commonplace a word.” Lifespan has a span, a bridge in it that the author cannot muster feelings for. So he settles for “our portion: a single share of the plentitude of time, with little or nothing to do with anything but love.”

LOVE AND FURY is a notable memoir for its honesty, curiosity, insight and true voice. Additionally, Hoffman weaves an interesting and noteworthy thread through the generations: the author’s father expects that life might not fair, but the rules ought to be the same for everyone; while the author’s daughter and her mate know that life is not fair and the rules are not the same for everyone.… (mais)

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Love & Fury by Richard Hoffman is a memoir of his complicated relationship with his father and other members of his family. It moves between past and present, exploring Hoffman's questions about why he is unable to understand his father, the love he nevertheless feels for the man who was both violent and loving toward his sons, and the grief Hoffman feels when he dies. That grief resurrects the pain of his mother's death decades before, and the even earlier deaths of two of Hoffman's three brothers due to muscular dystrophy.

At the same time he's dealing with all those losses he also faces serious problems within his own family. His wife is diagnosed with a serious illness, his son fights an addiction, and his daughter has a child with a black man who ends up being sent to prison. Hoffman tries to make sense of family's experience by placing it within the context of the times in which they live. That involves looking the changing fortunes of working class America, the racism with which Hoffman was raised, and the current prejudices faced by blacks in this country even if they, like the father of Hoffman's grandson, are immigrants from the Caribbean and therefore not really part of the long history of the African American experience of bigotry. Throughout, Hoffman is honest about his mistakes and the ways in which he doesn't live up to his own best intentions.

He offers no pat answers, but instead simply describes the process of moving forward, loving and honoring difficult people and while trying not to carry the worst of their struggles and mistakes into the future. In the process he creates a story that's moving, even for those of whose struggle between familial love and fury is far less fraught than his.… (mais)