Wolff, Tobias - Robert Stone (review date 15 November 1996)
Robert Stone (review date 15 November 1996)
SOURCE: Stone, Robert. “Finding Mercy in a God-forsaken World.” Times Literary Supplement (15 November 1996): 23
[In the following review of The Night in Question, Stone remarks on Wolff's moral perspective and the religious overtones in his work.]
The work of Tobias Wolff provides a blend of satisfactions not always available in combination. Wolff is both subtle and passionate. He often appears as a wry but sympathetic observer of the disappointments and petty strategies that define obscure unexamined lives. Yet, his true subject is nothing less than the world, how it goes. He is not a wringer of significances from everything in sight; few writers are less pretentious. At the same time, few can describe with so steady a hand the summoning of interior resources by unlikely figures whom some force has chosen to ennoble by pain and spare or destroy. He never backs away from the...
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