From the L.A. Times:
“”Little Boy Blues’ restores a reader’s faith in memoir.”
From the Miami Herald:
“Jones turned out to be exceptionally adept at excavating memories.”
From USA Today:
“…with poignancy and gentle humor.”
Malcolm Jones has written for Newsweek’s culture section for more than two decades, but here he switches from analyzing our shared history to his own. He states in this beautifully rendered memoir that he remembers the atrophy and disintegration of his parents’ marriage, which took place against the backdrop of the South’s stumble toward integration, as ‘’scraps of scenes that only imply a story.” Those scraps are rendered with startling clarity, like deep-focus snapshots of brief, seemingly inconsequential moments (family picnics, seeing Lawrence of Arabia for the first time) and objects (his mother’s piano, an abandoned set of marionettes) that only began to cast their long shadows on the author in midlife.
The casual experiences and observations of a young boy, filtered through the mind of that same child many years later, feel less explicative than exploratory. It’s as if Jones has yet to pin down how he feels about his often absent father or his woebegone mother, who clings to her only son like a life preserver. Ultimately, Little Boy Blues is a diffuse, evocative portrait of a child navigating a judgmental family ruled by Southern-fried traditions. The book ends with a scene set in the present day, as the author contemplates old family photographs and tries to reconcile his present with his past. ”It would be too grandiose to claim that I am haunted by these pictures. It is enough to say that they pester me,” he writes. As Faulkner once wrote, the past is never dead — it’s not even past. A–
–Entertainment Weekly
“Fragrant with wistfulness and poignant with regret.”
–Kirkus
“Some people fear losing their parents; others couldn’t lose them if they tried. “Nothing about her dying surprised me much,” writes Malcolm Jones about the death of his mother. “It’s how fiercely she stayed alive after she was dead that caught me unaware.” Jones’s warmly elegant memoir, Little Boy Blues, recalls his childhood in an impoverished, fractured North Carolina household of the 1950s and ’60s. Smitten as a young boy with movies and magic tricks, and “furtively vain about my hard life,” Jones retrieves elusive memories—of his emotionally stranded mother; his alcoholic, mostly absent father; his devout, “casually racist” aunt and uncle—and creates a rich tapestry of Southern life.”
–Oprah Magazine
“Malcolm Jones describes his Southern childhood without bathos and with elegant restraint, reminding me a little of the delayed and muffled detonations in Joyce’s “The Dead.” Little Boy Blues is a quiet accretion of quiet things that add up to something all the more powerful by not having been larded up with drama. In unaffected but perfectly tuned prose he describes his helplessness and loneliness of growing up with an alcoholic, often absent father, and a distracted, increasingly distraught mother. There is an endearing guilelessness to his descriptions of the racial upheaval of that time and place—North Carolina in the 50’s—and an authenticity to his dead-on details: the tin-lined drink cases with the soda pop submerged in icy water, the holes in the floorboards of the Plymouth, the candies melted into one rock hard lump in the parlor, and heartbreak in the realization that T.E. Lawrence was right: ‘The trick…is not minding that it hurts.’”
–Sally Mann
“With affectionate regard, Little Boy Blues captures the minutiae of a world far removed—Mason jars with lightning bugs, the delivery of a piano, the caustics of Christian catechism. Jones chronicles one family’s sleepwalk out of the Eisenhower era into the fast forward jump-cut dynamics of an integrated South. This is a story epic in its intimacies.”
–Van Dyke Parks
“Little Boy Blues is an extraordinary memoir with the compelling intimacy and frankness of a late-night conversation. In a narrative that is singularly clear and forthright, Malcolm Jones makes the reader feel the powerful bond that grows between his mother and her son during the frequent absences of his handsome, charming, and childish father. He makes us feel the disturbing thrill of finding in old family photographs truths that they were never intended to record, even truths that they were intended to hide. He takes us to live for a while in the place and time of his childhood, to see it as he saw it, and to feel it as he felt it. He makes us experience with him his discovery that his childhood was something different from what he thought it was, and we feel with him the sadness that comes when childhood’s illusions fall away. His portrait of his mother and his account of the way that she came to rely more and more on her young son are vivid, heartfelt, and heartbreaking. Among the many, many strengths of Little Boy Blues is the way Jones balances two views of his past: the naive experiences of the boy who lived it and the deep perceptions of the man that boy has become. It is a wonderful book.”
–Eric Kraft
“Malcolm Jones’s memoir is beautifully written and heartfelt. His clear-eyed view of growing up in the South and his honest look at the complexities of familial love will leave few readers unmoved.”
–George Pelecanos