Arts

Oh the Glory of It All
By Sean Wilsey (Penguin, $25.95)

© David McCormick

Wilsey bares all, extravagantly.

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Even before The New Yorker published a juicy excerpt of this massive memoir in its April 11 issue, it was already eliciting shouts and murmurs from San Francisco society types. Perhaps the loudest objector thus far has been Dede Wilsey, the author's stepmother—and the only figure in the book whom he seems unable to forgive. The prominent socialite and philanthropist is contemplating a libel suit, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

So what does Sean Wilsey say about her that's so damning?

In point of fact, she doesn't seem crazier than the rest of the author's fractured family—just meaner. Wilsey's mother, Pat Montandon, has beauty-queen looks and a personality that veers between Mother Teresa and Mommy Dearest. (In the book's most harrowing sequence, she invites young Sean to join her in a double suicide.) His father, Alfred Wilsey, is a self-made butter mogul; after a messy 1979 divorce that turns Montandon into the butt of tabloid jokes, Alfred marries her best friend, Diane "Dede" Traina, and gives up on his gawky son, shipping him from boarding school to boarding school during the '80s. The teenaged Wilsey reacts like Holden Caulfield, and Glory takes us on an entertaining tour of blue-blood reform schools—some morally bankrupt, others merely incompetent. (Originally, Wilsey planned to make the book a journalistic work about such institutions.)

While his father appears merely neglectful and self-centered, Dede receives the brunt of the author's anger. When Wilsey invents a post-curfew escapade to impress his father, Dede excoriates him, then exploits his worst fear: "With this you have really blown it. And I'll tell you why. Because your father will never trust or respect you again."

Wilsey interviewed an impressive number of relatives, family friends, and school chums in order to re-create his adolescence, and this thoroughness pays off. He's got an eye for detail—and for the absurd, as when he describes a boarding-school boy who captures houseflies, refrigerates them into a state of torpor, and ties them to his fingertips. On the other hand, perhaps to compensate for his mere 35 years of life material, Wilsey tosses in the saga of his maternal grandparents, evangelicals who roamed the Dust Bowl; and that of his paternal grandmother, who lived through the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

On the whole, though, Glory is a sprint, not a slog. That's mostly because Wilsey is so good at channeling childhood innocence, in all its awkward glory, which distinguishes the book from other silver-spoon memoirs. Describing his father's attempt to give him the Sex Talk via a Playboy centerfold, Wilsey spins the frantic free association of his confused 9-year-old mind into dorky comedy: "I felt like doing her bidding. I wasn't sure what she was bidding me to do. Grab the magazine to my chest? Crinkle the pages as hard as I could? Eat them? Roll around in the backseat with them? Beat someone in wrestling?"

Though it's an old trick, the author's willingness to embarrass himself is endearing, whether he's confessing his contradictory lust for demonic Dede, walking us through his sexual awakening, or just beating critics to the punch ("I fear the first reviewer who tells me I feel too sorry for myself, I'm too messy . . . I've taken up too much of your time"). You'd think a nearly 500-page book deeply colored by the author's obsessions would grow tiresome, but Wilsey keeps it fresh. This is a lively account of a life we're not supposed to feel sorry for so much as marvel at. NEAL SCHINDLER

Sean Wilsey will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 7:30 p.m. Fri., June 3.

The Wonder Spot
By Melissa Bank (Viking, $24.95)

I really want to believe that Melissa Bank isn't like the other girls, and there's more than one reason to think it's true. Her heroines—Jane, of the wildly popular The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and now Sophie Applebaum in The Wonder Spot—aren't just looking for men, they're looking for themselves. More often than not, they don't confuse the two. Helen Fielding can keep her Bridget Jones journaling, flubbing, and buggering for eons, but it isn't likely that her heroine will soon get over the need for a warm body—any warm body—in her bed. With Sophie, on the other hand, Bank has created a woman who almost seems too discerning about who's in her bed. Nearly every time you think she's with someone who might work out, Sophie ducks out of the relationship. Bank takes her borderline neurotic heroine up to her grandmother's house in the Bronx, or over to her brother and sister-in-law's crowded apartment, or back in time to reflect on some critical girlhood friendship. Anywhere, so long as she's not in a relationship that merely suffices.

In other words, Bank gives Sophie a life independent of the men she's dating or not dating. It's so goddamn refreshing— except that she really peters out at the end, just as I was almost sure that I had found the real thing.