The Lost Boy

Dave Pelzer

The Lost Boy
A Man Named Dave

These are the second and third books in the trilogy started with A Child Called It. THE LOST BOY continues the story of the author's childhood between the ages of twelve and eighteen and A MAN NAMED DAVE relates his adult years.

THE LOST BOY starts with Pelzer being rescued from the appalling abuse he suffered at the hands of his dysfunctional, alcoholic mother. He spends his adolescence in a succession of foster homes, finding it difficult to adjust or relate to others and getting into trouble serious enough to land him in juvenile hall. A MAN NAMED DAVE sees him setting out on his own and serving with distinction in the Air Force as well as exploring the effects of his earlier life on the break-up of his first marriage and his relationships with others.

In both books the spectre of his mother is never far away. In A MAN NAMED DAVE he finally confronts her in an attempt to get to the bottom of what made her treat him the way she did, and he also makes peace with the father who stood back and let it happen.

Pelzer's is a harrowing tale, so I'm left wondering why I'm not as moved or affected by it as, presumably, I should be. I've been thinking about this and haven't come up with anything. Maybe it's because there's no real synthesis between his own experiences and the broader picture. Child abuse continues to be a common social ill, but bar a brief afterword in THE LOST BOY, there is no real sense of its extent or effects as a whole. As I mentioned in an earlier review of A CHILD CALLED 'IT', this is something which could have been addressed in the hands of a top-notch investigative journalist without losing sight of the author's own tale.

Although these two volumes are better-written than A CHILD CALLED 'IT', there are still annoying imbalances. Six pages devoted to a visit to his grandmother, yet scarcely two lines as to how he achieved his ambition of making air crew. He also tells us how his upbringing led him to value honesty above all, yet it is clear from reading between the lines that he must have been economical with the truth in order to get into the Air Force in the first place.

And he still doesn't answer the question he set out to answer in the first volume, viz. how a seemingly loving mother could turn into such a witch. The evidence seems to suggest that it was because her own mother locked her in a cupboard for being badly behaved as a child, but no doubt thousands of children suffered a similar fate without going on to become sadistic monsters.

So I'm left scratching my head. I admire Pelzer's courage in opening up his heart and for overcoming the physical and mental scars to achieve so much in life, and the love he has for his own son is almost suffocating, but I just wish he had gone a bit further.

To sum up: I put these into the worth-reading-but-not-necessarily-buying category. Check out your library or do what I did and borrow 'em from somebody else.