Homebush Boy - a Memoir

By Thomas Keneally and Tom Keneally

Book Overview

In this playful and poignant memoir, Thomas Keneally returns to his adolescence in the suburbs of Sydney in 1952. At sixteen, the red-haired teenager idolized the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0340606843
• ISBN13: 9780340606841
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.9" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

"I was the sort of kid men took aside for serious talks."

Anyone who has ever enjoyed a novel by Thomas Keneally and wondered about his "inner man" will be richly rewarded by this perceptive, unpretentious, and often light-hearted memoir of life during his 17th year. The year 1952, was, he says, a "reckless, sweet, divinely hectic and subtly hormonal year...the most succulent and the most dangerous [year]," one which "lightly embarked on, [has] not to this day ceased to tease, govern and turn on me." Capturing the confusion of adolescence, along with the trying on of roles, the dreams of the future, and his own willing surrender to aesthetic and otherworldly influences, he introduces the reader to his family, his school, his neighborhood, his church, and his psyche, as he "hungers for grandeur" and makes decisions which will ultimately affect the course of his life. Vividly depicting his friends, the Celestials, with whom he shares his last year at St. Pat's, a boys' day school about 15 miles outside of Sydney, he reveals himself, at seventeen, as an adequate athlete, an excellent writer, a devoted friend (especially to a blind student, the first ever to sit for the Leaving Certificate from a regular school), a dreamer of literary glory, a devout communicant, and a naïve worshipper-from-afar of the equally naïve Bernadette Curran. With his characteristically astute eye for imagery and an acute sensitivity (born, in this case, of hindsight) to the pressures pushing him to become a priest, Keneally reconstructs this tumultuous year and the decisions he and his friends ultimately make about their futures. As the reader empathizes with the seventeen-year-old Keneally and appreciates both the atmosphere of Homebush in 1952 and the power of outside forces to affect his life, s/he also appreciates more fully the nature of the true creative urge and the urgency of its release. Less then ten years later, when Keneally's voice finally (and brilliantly) bursts forth, literary history begins a glorious new chapter. Though out-of-print, this book is readily available on Used sites, and Keneally lovers will find it unforgettable. Mary Whipple