Truth Comes in Blows

Truth Comes in Blows is distinguished editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's richly textured account of a coming-of-age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. Planted between him and his entry into adulthood, autonomy, and the wider world was Ben Solotaroff - as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, shrewd, seductive, and impossibly overbearing, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man carried to the edge - "almost all ego and almost no conscience." Against this formidable scion of the fierce Solotaroff clan stood Ted's mother, Rose, product of the cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and Manhattan's Upper West Side. Truth Comes in Blows takes such classic themes as the strife between an uneducated father and his bookish son, the equivocal love of a boy for his victimized mother, the central place of sports in forming masculine character, the romance of post-immigrant Jews with middle America and its literature, the perplexities of sex, and the imperatives and guilt of breaking away - and renews them by means of a remarkable candor, intelligence, and crystalline particulars.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.