Books in Brief: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany

Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany, by Joel Agee (Farrar, 324 pp., $15.95). From 1948 until 1960, Joel Agee lived with his brother, mother, and stepfather in East Germany, and this is the story of that boyhood. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it. The author, son of the American writer James Agee, seems to have survived a typical boyhood, for a literary man, full of the usual misunderstandings, sexual awakening, longings, schoolboy wit, and bad philosophy. Of course, not everyone has grown up in East Germany, been raised to be a good Communist, had his political consciousness heightened by a stepfather who was an author and well respected in the Party. Not only that, but Joel Agee, now a writer and Harper’s fiction editor, knows how to tell the story well. Considering the circumstances, it comes as something of a surprise to find the essentials of the story so exactly familiar, which probably points up something profound, although it seems better to let it go at: Boys will be boys. It is no easy time in general, and it was no easy time for young Agee, detached from his boyhood by being an American in a foreign land. He seems to have done badly in school, which naturally takes up most of his book. But, as Martin Levin wrote in the introduction to Five Boyhoods (1962), “Perhaps the keynote of the formative years, after all, is a resistance to being formed.” Twelve Years is very good of its kind. joe mysak