YOUNG MAN, MUDDLED

An account of crucial years in the author’s life.

In his sensitive debut memoir, essayist, biographer, and nonfiction writer Kanigel (b. 1946) recounts his life in the 1960s, when the Vietnam War roiled the country and he confronted his unsettled future. He had grown up in a working- and middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood with parents who valued books, education, the arts, and ideas. He was a bright student, and at his mother’s behest, he skipped third grade and, later, seventh in an accelerated program. He commuted for hours to attend academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. At 16, he began college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where most of his classmates “were careerist, conventional, and hard-working, as was I.” As the author remembers, his future seemed ordained: He would find a good engineering job, marry, have children, buy a house, and settle down to a conventional life. His first job was designing bullets, “a new, more destructive kind intended to tear through the sides of Russian tanks, destroy them, and kill everyone inside.” His next job had less lethal implications: producing an automatic speed control system at Bendix Automotive Electronics. At 21, he got engaged, but a year later, suddenly feeling overwhelmed by a “cold, constrained” image of his future, he broke it off. “The Sixties inched up on me,” he writes, “my eyes gradually widening to change and possibility, more slowly than for others, I think—but made all the sweeter by having come up through those earlier, flatter Fifties.” He soon followed a brilliant, volatile girlfriend to Paris, returning with the impulse to write. When his mother read some early “raw rants,” she recommended Strunk and White. Reflecting on his intense love affair and surprising decision to become a writer, he sees them arising from the same impulse—“the wish, and need, long tamped down, to venture beyond all I’d known as a boy within the embrace of my parents,” and to dive into “the big world beyond theirs.”

Thoughtful, candid reminiscences from a veteran writer.