Truth Comes in Blows

An arresting and richly textured account of coming of age-at once classically American and especially vexed. Planted firmly between the young Ted Solotaroff and his entry into the wider world was Ben Solotaroff-as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as could be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, driven, shrewd, and impossibly overbearing, this self-made man headed off each morning to the Standard Plate Glass Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey, the way George Patton headed off to battle. Against this formidable adversary stood his mother, Rose, product of the more cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and the Upper West Side. Their marriage was both stormy and sensual, and young Ted came early to understand himself as divided between the "Little Benny" who took after his contentious father and "the Weiss boy" of his mother's affections. His ongoing struggle for self-definition was played out at the family dinner table, classrooms, gyms and baseball fields, and the inner reaches of his psyche. Truth Comes in Blows takes the classic themes of struggling to maturity and renews them with unsparing intelligence and crystalline particulars. Volumes' worth of insight into what it means to be a man, a son, a Jew, and an American are distilled in its pages into a resonant story of family conflict and hard-won reconciliation.