THE BOY AND THE BIG WHITE ROCK

Antil describes his rural childhood in the 1950s and ’60s in this memoir.

In some ways, the author’s childhood was like one long summer at camp—he and his seven siblings were raised on a sprawling 84-acre Community Conservation Corps–built park property his parents bought at the end of the Depression and rehabilitated over the course of the 1940s. The seventh of eight children, Antil enjoyed an idyllic upbringing surrounded by the hills and waterfalls of Central New York. Jutting from a nearby cliff that overlooked the property was the eponymous big white rock, where the young Antil would sit and think about the world and his life, reflecting on events from the eruption of a new war in Korea to a satisfying and profitable day of selling hot dogs with a friend. His childhood was characterized in part by the schemes of his father, a commercial bakery owner, which included building a bomb shelter to protect the family during the height of the Cold War. (“My father’s plan was that the flat roof of the bomb shelter would serve as a sun deck off the living room, as if it would mask the structure’s hidden agenda, its fictional purpose of withstanding a hydrogen bomb blast.”) The author, who would eventually grow to a height of 6 feet, 10 inches, tried to resist “the tall fellow’s sport” (“playing basketball would be a charade,” he thought, “a ridiculous cliche”). Eventually, however, he was urged onto the court, where he played well enough to help his team win a championship his junior year of high school. His senior year saw him switching schools and sleeping on a cot above a partially constructed ice cream parlor in Syracuse—one of his father’s failed business ventures. With humor and a great sense of time and place, Antil spins stories of his coming of age in this unlikely setting.

The author has a novelistic sense of detail, writing of his family members in a way that makes them seem slightly larger than life: “My father’s entrance coming in the house and into the light of the dining room was as matter-of-fact as a ship’s captain…He offered no formal greeting or smile; he paced about as if the meeting was a necessary interruption to a whirlwind he was riding on.” The narrative is episodic, offering short vignettes that range from the incidental to the comic to the unexpectedly poignant. After a fairly jocular story about the “sex talk” he received from his father, Antil reveals the significantly more earnest counsel his sisters received, which he only learned of years later: “If you get in trouble, bring the baby home. We’ll raise it.” Together, these anecdotes perhaps don’t amount to quite enough to engage an audience with no connection to the author’s previous books or to the Central New York region. Even so, there are many wonderful moments here that capture not only America at mid-century but also an off-beat family whose way of life, for better or for worse, feels quite remote from the present day.

A frequently rewarding memoir of coming of age in the 1960s.