Oh Boy, Here Comes Walt!

Robert Kirsh, Los Angeles Times-- Nostalgia is a response to a time of despair but its haze can make iron pyrites seem like gold. Vahan Gregory's "Oh Boy, Here Comes Walt!" avoids such distortion. Gregory's episodic account of a young boy's rites of passage in the late '30s, in the small town of Pompton Lakes, N.J., is an extraordinary evocation of the loss of innocence. This is a favored theme in America but few writers have handled it so well. Gregory's narration retains the bittersweet flavor of youth, poignant without sentimentality, sensitive without sensationalism, touched with a sense of immediacy and an unsparing awareness of life and death, love and cruelty. There is the heft and feel of a classic in its pages.