“The boys” are Adam and Huck, former college roommates. A decade out of college and just as long out of touch with each other, they are reunited when Adam arrives to share Huck’s apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco.
“Their baby” is Christopher, Huck’s entrancing almost-one-year-old son, whose mother is nowhere in evidence and, at first, much to Adam’s befuddlement, mysteriously unmentioned.
The story centers on Adam as he sets out to construct a life for himself in the unfamiliar city. He assumes his new job as an English teacher at a fancy private school, where one of his students develops an obsessive (and disturbing) interest in him. Adam coasts into simultaneous affairs with two women: one of them a striking, locally celebrated chanteuse, and the other a physics teacher with a distinctive footwear fetish.
As the city and its denizens—women and men, gay and straight, young and old—make Adam welcome in various and telling ways…as he approaches a certain peace with his past (through letters to and from his riotously enraged ex-girlfriend and his hugely intimidating mother)…as living with the baby and the baby’s father exerts a profound influence on Adam…as the story of the baby’s missing mother dramatically unfolds…we watch Adam come to surprising terms with his life and himself.
The Boys and Their Baby is a wonderfully entertaining novel of domestic and sexual manners, 1980s San Francisco-style, marking the debut of splendidly gifted novelist Larry Wolff.
From Publishers Weekly
The evocation of San Francisco's ambience is the best thing about this sometimes perceptive, sometimes irritating first novel. Wolff blatantly tags his characters with symbolic names: Adam (the innocent first man) comes to California to teach English in a private school and moves in with his erstwhile Yale roommate Huck (as in Finn) and Huck's adorable baby boy, Christopher, whose presence will indeed redeem all the characters as they move from guilt to penance and redemption. The mother-dominated Adam, so unwordly he is almost a wimp, is overwhelmed by San Francisco's sophistication, its joie de vivre that coexists with an earthquake mentality. He is introduced to Huck's friends: the chanteuse Lucille, who becomes his lover; a gay duo, Timmy and Tommy, who live upstairs; the five students in his class at the Stringfellow School, all of whom are less naive than he; and another former Yale classmate and fellow teacher, Amy Armstrong, with whom he also begins an affair. Questions about fidelity and responsibility, musings about the validity of structuralist criticism (Adam's mother is a noted professor in the field) and the violation of taboos mingle with genuinely appealing scenes of domesticity. But the story is fuzzy and unfocused, and the central eventthe arrival of Christopher's mentally unbalanced motheris foreshadowed with so heavy a hand that suspense is nil. While intelligently written, in the end this novel about "boys who are somehow not quite men and men who are still somehow little boys" offers more promise than satisfaction.
