Note: This post originally appeared at Wisconsin Writers Association on December 14, 2020 https://wiwrite.org/book-reviews/9428543
Cretin Boy by Jim Landwehr
Memoir, 185 pages
2020, Burning Bulb Publishing
Greg's Review:
Jim Landwehr has written two previous memoirs and five poetry collections, but
he hits his storytelling stride with a coming-of-age memoir Cretin Boy.
Cretin stands Cretin High School, the Catholic military academy Landwehr
attended in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the late 1970s. Webster’s also defines
cretin as “a very stupid or foolish person.”
Landwehr and his
buddies sometimes live up to that definition.
Narrow escapes from cops while drinking? Check.
Death-defying traffic stunts? Check.
Dimwittedly doling out cash for first-car clunkers? Check.
Still, having grown up among six kids with a single mother
after his father died young, Landwehr portrays himself as awkward and
introverted, the “good son” and lacking self-esteem.
Using self-deprecating humor, Landwehr details incompetence at
shooting guns, driving cars and approaching the opposite sex.
It doesn’t help the latter issue that Cretin is only for
boys. Or that Cretin instructors include military officers and many Catholic
Brothers, men committed to Christianity who live on campus. Landwehr explains
the oddities in describing Brother Gerard.
“He was a frail, senior Brother who was tasked with teaching
us Biblical truth while at the same time discussing human sexual anatomy and
addressing embarrassing subjects like masturbation, intercourse and birth
control. It seemed strange to mix the message of ‘don’t do this’ with ‘but if
you do this other thing, then do this.’ It was even weirder because it was coming
from someone apparently older than my grandparents, from a man who had pledged
himself to a life of celibacy…”
Landwehr uses decades of life experience to put perspective
on adolescent escapades. “We were pushing the envelope in our struggle for
independence and on our road to adulthood,” he writes.
If there’s one concern, it’s that this book, like many
produced by small companies or self-published, needed better proofreading.
Rather than write a chronology, Landwehr organizes stories
into chapters such as Marching, Jobs, and Girls. The longest are Vices and Cars.
Maybe the strict combination of church and state discipline drove
these boys to mischief beyond their school halls, but readers, regardless of which
decade they grew up, will identify with many of these stories and find
themselves reminiscing about their own high school days.
biking, kayaking, canoeing, camping and fishing. It was his love of camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota that led him to write Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir. The book features humorous accounts of trips he took to the area with his brothers, friends and children over the past twenty five years.
Jim is married to Donna and has two children. He lives and
works in Waukesha, Wisconsin as a Land Information Systems Supervisor for
Waukesha County. He was the 2018/2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.
Reviewer Greg Peck of Janesville worked for
newspapers in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin Rapids and Janesville and won many
journalism awards before retiring in 2016. Peck is author of Death Beyond
the Willows and the new Memories of Marshall, Ups and Downs of Growing
Up in a Small Town. He’s a former board member of the Wisconsin Writers
Association and won the WWA’s Jade Ring in nonfiction.
