A youth that makes adulthood look anticlimactic

Hollywood legend has it that Alfred Hitchcock’s father sent his mischievous son to a London police chief with a note requesting that the boy be locked in a cell for an hour. The disciplinary tactic worked wonders: Hitchcock never disobeyed again, and he went on to make a brilliant career of exploring his grim obsessions, many of which he owed to his brief tenure behind bars.

Readers of Sean Wilsey’s new memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All,” may wish his parents had had the foresight, or at least the luck, of Hitchcock senior. More than two-thirds of the way into the book, Wilsey tells how, after spending a night in San Francisco juvenile detention as a derelict teenager, he solemnly resolved to make good. But what precedes and follows this anecdote is a story that squanders the author’s abundant talent and the reader’s patience.

“Oh the Glory of It All” recounts the trials and tribulations of Wilsey, an editor at large at McSweeney’s Quarterly, including his parents’ 1979 divorce, at the time the most expensive in San Francisco history. Wilsey was 9 when his father, Alfred Wilsey, left his socialite and author wife, Patricia Montandon, for her best friend, socialite Dede Traina, who has the dual role in this memoir as evil stepmother and Sean’s ultimate sexual fantasy.

After the divorce, Montandon devoted herself to the shameless pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, shepherding her son and a pack of multiracial children around the globe to beg world leaders to end the arms race. He writes of meeting and beseeching Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Jehan Sadat and the pope. “Your sentiments have nothing to do with reality,” a drunken Graham Greene tells Montandon about her “Children as Peacemakers” crusade. “All children are violent. They’re mean and savage. There’s nothing peaceful about children.”

When the young Wilsey is sent to a Massachusetts boarding school, he escapes his mother’s suffocating idealism only to find himself in a setting that conforms to Greene’s vision. In one of the book’s most bitterly satirical passages, he suggests replacing St. Mark’s crest of a winged lion holding a book with a triptych: “a small asphyxiated pig, its skin blue, lying on a bathroom floor with a CO2 cartridge at its side; a multipanel tableau showing two bears urinating in a trash can ... then dumping this can all over the clothes and possessions of a third bear with bad posture and a sensitive muzzle; and, finally, a group of seven donkeys, some dressed in sport jackets and ties, some in lacrosse gear -- all coltishly braying! -- daring each other to participate in a Clockwork Orange-style gang rape of an inebriated, long-lashed doe, dressed in an unbuttoned oxford shirt.”

After a series of spectacular failures at boarding schools, an escape from a summer program, a night spent in lockup for joyriding and some marginal success with the opposite sex, Wilsey writes of winding up at an Italian reform school, where he succumbs to the school philosophy, “We believe every child should have his own Renaissance.”

He learns Italian, becomes a passionate reader and finds a father figure in the school’s director. Subsequently he moves to Manhattan, where he goes to college, works for the New Yorker, meets his wife and learns to love his parents again. At this point, a tedious narrative ensues about the researching and writing of this memoir.

Wilsey has a keen eye for details, and he manages some subtle, if perhaps too cute, descriptions: The sound of fizz in a glass of soda becomes “a miniature stadium of applause”; a teenage girl has “light bulb shoulders.” Readers who came of age in the 1980s will appreciate references to Thrasher magazine, the Police and Gotcha apparel, but too often he relies on pop culture banalities to enhance his prose. These shortcuts (“Royal Tenenbaums-style,” “Dennis-the-Menace-resembling,” etc.) have the unfortunate effect of robbing his experiences of their uniqueness.

The main problem is that Wilsey hews too closely to the McSweeney literary model: typographical tricks, hyper-fluency in pop culture and exuberantly high-pitched prose. All conspire against the emotional registers he so wants to express.

Wilsey may have his own misgivings, especially about the book’s more self-indulgent aspects: Toward the end of “Oh the Glory of It All,” he says, “I can’t wait to write about something besides myself.” But one has trouble seeing Wilsey, a la Hitchcock, discreetly casting himself as an extra in his own script.

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Thomas Meaney is a critic whose reviews have appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail and the New Criterion magazine.