Toy Fights
A Boyhood
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“It’s wonderful, aggressively wise, and always—especially at its most serious—devastatingly funny.” —Geoff Dyer
For readers of Douglas Stuart and Nick Hornby comes an uproarious, tenderhearted memoir of growing up in working-class Dundee in the 1970s and 1980s.
Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, possessed of “an infinite sensitivity to the world” (Zadie Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, from the titular childhood game (“basically twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext”) to the virtues of the sugary sweet known as tablet. When American pop culture arrived, Paterson fell hard for the so-called outlaw sound; by his teens, he was traveling with his father, a Stetson-wearing “country” musician, and becoming guitar-mad himself. A memoir of family, music, and highly inventive profanity, Toy Fights is an unforgettable account of the years we all spend in rehearsal for real life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and jazz guitarist Paterson (The Arctic) chronicles in this exuberant memoir his working-class childhood in Dundee, Scotland, up through his departure for London at the age of 20 in 1984. Socially awkward and intellectually curious, Paterson immersed himself in such unlikely pursuits as creating pornographic origami at age 10 and joining a Pentecostal sect as a teen before he settled on the guitar—which he'd played on and off his whole life—as his primary obsession. Elsewhere, Paterson describes his psychotic break after ingesting heroin-laced hashish as a teenager, which caused him to hear voices in his head and become convinced that his parents were poisoning him. Paterson's musings are shot through with sharp wit, especially when he's taking aim at hypocrites in the arts and in his life—at one point, he writes that narcissists "usually consist of a paper-thin, wildly overconfident act disguising a crust of fear, over a mantle of shame, wrapped round a core of nothing." Most enchanting are Paterson's musings on music, from hilarious reminiscences of the Dundee folk scene ("ome hippy dressed as a returning trawlerman in a sou'wester... sang forty verses about the 1894 Whelk Pickers' Strike in Buckie") to gorgeous homages to obscure performers: "The note starts off straight and pure, then suddenly yields to some hidden ache it finds in itself," he writes about a performance by Norwegian singer Radka Toneff. The result is a raucously funny picaresque laced with hard-earned wisdom.
