Stop-Time: A Memoir

Conroy has been compared to Holden Caulfield, but Stop-Time, of course, is memoir - not fiction. Also, Conroy's writing is understated, haunting, and lyrical, even when he's talking about pretty brutal and gritty stuff. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to study the art of the memoir. First published in 1967, it still rings with the truth of boyhood and adolescence during a certain time in America.The facts are not so terribly remarkable: He grew up poor, was bright but didn't do well in school, moved around a lot, his father died when he was 12, and he didn't get along with his stepfather (who, after Conroy's mother left, moved an insane girlfriend into the home). Okay, all that makes a good enough tale - but what really elevates it to high art is Conroy's skill as a writer, his ability to take a teensy memory or detail and expand it into something utterly remarkable.Read it.

The memoir has become a particularly prominent literary form in the past decade, often blending fact and fiction in licentious literary exploration. I think, particularly, of Mary Karr ("The Liar's Club" and, more recently, "Cherry") and Kathryn Harrison ("The Kiss") and, of course, Frank McCourt's Irish ramblings, among others. But thirty or so years before all these candid, sometimes titillating, self confessions, Frank Conroy wrote a book titled "Stop-Time," a memoir that surpasses all of them in the beauty of its prose and the poignant and deep sensitivity of its feeling."Stop-Time" tells the story of Frank Conroy's first eighteen years of life, a life marked by the ordinary rather than the lurid or unseemly. But the ordinariness of the life is elevated by the dreamlike, sensitive, asynchronous wonder of Conroy's writing. As Conroy relates in the first chapter of his narrative, in a passage that gives you a feeling for his writing style and for the narrative to follow: "My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies." "Stop-Time" is a stunning example of how great writing can elevate even the most ordinary of lives. The facts of Conroy's memoir are not remarkable. He grew up in relatively poor circumstances, his father died of cancer when he was 12 and lived most of his life apart from Conroy's mother, he spent his time primarily between New York and Florida, and he was a bright boy who performed miserably in school. But while the broad outlines of his life are seemingly unremarkable, Conroy possesses the great gift of the writer: he can focus on the mote of dust floating in the sunlight and take the reader into a world of dreams and memories that are startlingly real, a world that the reader can feel and identify from his or her own recollections of growing up. Conroy can lie down in a kennel with his family's dogs and dream that he, too, is a dog running through a field. He can relate the fear of being left alone in a cold cabin in the middle of winter while his mother and her boyfriend work the third shift at a state mental institution. He can recall a trip to the carnival with his best friend and how he was cheated and more by a seedy carnie hawker. He can precisely detail learning all the tricks you can do with a yo-yo, and learn them well. And he can recall the tumescent longings of early adolescence, of sneaking and peeking with his cousin and, as he got older, of experiencing, too. It is all related with a feeling, with a literary sense, that would be called "perfect pitch" if it were music. "Stop-Time" is a remarkably written memoir that not only should be read, but also studied, as a stunning example of how the literary imagination can give vibrant life to the mundane.

The memoir has become a particularly prominent literary form in the past decade, often blending fact and fiction in licentious literary exploration. I think, particularly, of Mary Karr ("The Liar's Club" and, more recently, "Cherry") and Kathryn Harrison ("The Kiss") and, of course, Frank McCourt's Irish ramblings, among others. But thirty or so years before all these candid, sometimes titillating, self confessions, Frank Conroy wrote a book titled "Stop-Time," a memoir that surpasses all of them in the beauty of its prose and the poignant and deep sensitivity of its feeling."Stop-Time" tells the story of Frank Conroy's first eighteen years of life, a life marked by the ordinary rather than the lurid or unseemly. But the ordinariness of the life is elevated by the dreamlike, sensitive, asynchronous wonder of Conroy's writing. As Conroy relates in the first chapter of his narrative, in a passage that gives you a feeling for his writing style and for the narrative to follow: "My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies." "Stop-Time" is a stunning example of how great writing can elevate even the most ordinary of lives. The facts of Conroy's memoir are not remarkable. He grew up in relatively poor circumstances, his father died of cancer when he was 12 and lived most of his life apart from Conroy's mother, he spent his time primarily between New York and Florida, and he was a bright boy who performed miserably in school. But while the broad outlines of his life are seemingly unremarkable, Conroy possesses the great gift of the writer: he can focus on the mote of dust floating in the sunlight and take the reader into a world of dreams and memories that are startlingly real, a world that the reader can feel and identify from his or her own recollections of growing up. Conroy can lie down in a kennel with his family's dogs and dream that he, too, is a dog running through a field. He can relate the fear of being left alone in a cold cabin in the middle of winter while his mother and her boyfriend work the third shift at a state mental institution. He can recall a trip to the carnival with his best friend and how he was cheated and more by a seedy carnie hawker. He can precisely detail learning all the tricks you can do with a yo-yo, and learn them well. And he can recall the tumescent longings of early adolescence, of sneaking and peeking with his cousin and, as he got older, of experiencing, too. It is all related with a feeling, with a literary sense, that would be called "perfect pitch" if it were music. "Stop-Time" is a remarkably written memoir that not only should be read, but also studied, as a stunning example of how the literary imagination can give vibrant life to the mundane.

Few autobiographies that I have read match the power of this one. It manages to communicate the loneliness and isolation of youth and young adulthood, yet as a commentator on the book has correctly noted, it is free of self-pity or sentimentality.Like another great coming-of-age memoir, Richard Wright's "Black Boy," Conroy's work is a powerful rebuttal to romantic evocations of childhood. His was a life of rootlessness, occasional random (and inexplicable) violence and long stretches of boredom. Mental illness and instability seemed never to be far from his doorstep.Conroy doesn't shy away from describing any of this, or the effects that his difficult home life and environment had on him. In a powerful early scene, he describes joining in a boarding school attack on a vulnerable classmate. There are overtones of "Lord of the Flies," but the most effective -- and chilling -- quality of his description of the event is its tone of dispassion. For example, he tells of eagerly awaiting his chance to get a clean, unmolested shot at the kid, but then admits that the actual punch was disappointing, not what he thought it would be. This recitation of events is transmitted to us through the mind of the boy, not as a narrator who looks back, eager for the chance to justify or explain his motivation.But "Stop-Time" is elevated even further by Conroy's ability to capture moments of childhood magic (even though they are often leavened with disappointment). For example, there is a great chapter on his sudden obsession with learning how to do tricks with a yo-yo; another memorable sequence of scenes describes the uninhibited pleasure of driving bumper cars and partaking of a carnival's tawdry pleasures. Still, at the end of the carnival sequence, Conroy injects a note of menace, a recurring technique that emphasizes a key theme of the book: children, even in their happiest moments, are always moving toward the shadowy and dangerous landscape of adulthood.There are far too may great sections of this book to do it justice in a brief review. Suffice it to say that "Stop-Time" will deliver bittersweet pleasures, no matter how many times the reader returns to it.

I've read a lot of books- more than average, I think- not only because I like reading, but also because my job used to require that I read widely, even if not always well. There is an inevitable Ho-Hum effect when quantity outweighs quality as the basis for reading consumption, but a few stay in the mind, refusing to be speed-read or scanned, clamouring for due attention and recognition. 'Stop-Time', written in 1967, is such a book- the kind of book you find youself slowing over, deliberately postponing its all-too-near conclusion. My own copy was sent in a box of mixed material to be reviewed for `Idiom', the magazine of an Australian English Teachers Association,in 1987. The biography was, then, already twenty years old, yet I can remember being astonished by the newness of the described experiences, the total relevence I sensed to the existences of the adolescents with whom I was working. Needing confirmation of such a strong reaction to this 'classic memoir of adolescence', a time of life I had left far behind and may, indeed, have forgotten, I discarded the book within reach of my nineteen-yearold son, the bibliokleptic one. Three weeks later, the surgical procedure required to retrieve it from his predominantly female University household was worthy of the Mayo Clinic... proof, too, for me, that my first impressions had been valid. When noone wanted to give the book back, I knew it had passed its ultimate test. And the book continues to entertain, involving the reader to the extent that pages and sections need to be reread for more and more satisfaction, yielding, each time, greater insight and additional enjoyment. There is variety in this book- an incredible range of entrapped experiences that alternately horrify, amuse and educate. And often, so often, there is that flash of recognition- the familiar 'I have been there, too' sensation, as we identify with the author, which signals really great writing. 'The classic memoir of adolescence' , this book has been subtitled, and what a growing-up Frank Conroy is able to relive for us. Through a variety of schools, beginning with the ultimate in progressive education, (check out how the school solved the smoking problem!) detouring slightly via a training school for the intellectually handicapped, where his mother and stepfather were employed, into a state-managed high school and on to an International School in Denmark, the author makes his way from uneasy childhood through the agonizing process of sexual and emotional maturing, to his first day at Haverford College, at which point the odyssey ends abruptly. Too abruptly, I decided,for his adventures stayed long in my mind, and I found myself wanting to know more of his life. Could a sequel be arranged, I wondered then? Well, it couldn't apparently. Though I pestered book suppliers for years, his next, `Midair', finally arriving from America, turned out, disappointingly, to be a book of skillfully drawn short stories, great rea