Our Story Begins
Although Tobias Wolff is probably best known as the author of the memoir This Boy’s Life (1989), an account of his youthful struggles with a brutal stepfather that was made into a 1993 film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, his critical reputation rests largely on his three collections of short stories. Our Story Begins includes stories from each of these books, as well as ten new ones.
His first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), was well received by critics, several stories becoming favorite anthology pieces read widely by university students. The title story centers on a female history professor who goes for a job interview, only to find out that she has been invited merely to satisfy an affirmative-action requirement. When she presents a public lecture as part of the interview, she ignores her prepared paper and launches into a passionate account of how the Iroquois once captured two Jesuit priests in the area, graphically describing the tortures they suffered. She quotes one of the priests who, just before his agonizing death, tells his torturers to mend their lives. When the professorial audience tries to shout her down, she continues to exhort them to turn from power to love, to walk humbly. She even turns off her hearing aid so she will not be distracted. The story is an example of what Wolff has called “winging it,” which he describes as a kind of “lifting off, letting go,” listening to the voice within and speaking with the “magic of that voice.”
Wolff’s most famous example of “winging it” is the concluding story of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, “The Liar,” for it describes a sixteen-year-old boy who creates his own fictional world, precipitated by the death of his father, with whom the boy identifies because he coped with his fears by telling lies. The story ends with a poetic scene on a bus trip to Los Angeles, during which the boy tells his fellow passengers that he works with refugees from Tibet. When a woman asks him to speak some Tibetan, the others passengers lean back in their seats and close their eyes, while the boy, who knows no Tibetan, sings to them “in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue.” The story is a fiction-writer’s manifesto, a lyrical evocation about the human need to create an imaginative reality that bonds people together even as it asserts one’s own unique identity.
“Hunters in the Snow,” another favorite anthology piece from Wolff’s first collection, is a caricature of the macho-male buddy story. Tubby is the butt of jokes that his name suggests, stumbling clumsily with hidden snacks falling out of his hunting garb. Kenny is the bullying, sadistic practical joker. Frank is the central consciousness, the philosophic one, who talks of “centering” and going with the “forces” in the natural world, but who has romantic illusions of escaping a loveless marriage by running off with the baby sitter. This comedy of errors culminates when Kenny says he hates a dog they encounter and then shoots it. When he turns to Tub and says he hates him, too, the frightened Tubby shoots Kenny in the stomach. As Tub and Frank make comically clumsy attempts to get Kenny to the hospital in the back of their pickup, they stop at a cafe for coffee and get into a satiric conversation about friendship and being “really in love,” while Kenny is freezing outside. They both get a big laugh when Frank reveals to Tub that the dog’s owner asked Kenny to shoot...
(This entire section contains 1867 words.)
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it. Because of further comic mistakes and other stops, it seems clear that they will never get Kenny to the hospital in time to save him. However, that seems less important than Tub coming clean about his obsessive eating and Frank spouting still more clichés about love and friendship. The final joke is the last line, when, as Kenny mumbles he is going to the hospital, the reader discovers that he is wrong, for the two men had “taken a different turn a long way back.”
In Wolff’s second collection of stories, Back in the World (1985), “Soldier’s Joy” focuses on the search for camaraderie in the army, as one character insists that the Vietnam War was a fulfilling experience for him because it provided a home where he was with friends. Being back in the States, or “back in the world,” he says, lacks order and meaning. The final story in the collection, “The Rich Brother,” another frequent anthology favorite, is, Wolff has said, the closest thing to a fable he has ever written. The prodigal brother Donald is humane, generous, and a financial failure; the older brother Pete is successful, unfeeling, and dissatisfied. In the story, Pete comes to rescue Donald as he has in the past, but Pete gives up on his brother when once more he throws away his money on foolish fantasies and the needs of others. Nevertheless, the story ends with a redemptive change of heart.
Wolff demonstrates his careful control of the short-story form best when he follows Anton Chekhov’s famous dictum that it is better to say too little than too much. “Say Yes,” also from Wolff’s second collection, is a short, deceptively simple, piece. The initiating situation is a trivial, domestic one, and the characters, ordinary people, exist primarily to illustrate the points of view important to the story’s conflict. The simple situation soon develops into a significant universal conflict for no other reason than the participants are husband and wife, and therefore, in the tenuousness of that relationship, they are always hovering on the edge of conflict and collapse. The story is not about a minor conflict in the life of a particular couple, but rather it is an exploration of the ultimate strangeness of others, no matter how confident an individual may be that he “knows” another individual. The story suggests that strangeness or difference is not skin-deep but profound and universal.
Wolff’s third collection, The Night in Question (1996), received more positive reviews than Back in the World. It would seem that Wolff also likes these stories better than his earlier ones. He includes only four or five stories from each of the first two collections, but he includes twelve from the third one. Wolff continues to explore a favorite theme in this collection: the substitution of an imaginative reality for the unsatisfactory or unworthy real one. For example, in the story “Firelight,” a boy and his mother play fantasy shopping games by trying on clothes they know they cannot afford. When the boy finds out that his mother once turned down a marriage proposal from an all-American football player, he scolds her, complaining that they could be rich now. Wolff also continues to focus on another favorite theme herethe importance of story itself. In “The Night in Question,” the story is not a simple moral exemplum but a complex challenge to one’s own reason for being.
However, some of the stories in Wolff’s third collection suggest a slackening from his earlier work. Some are merely concept stories, clever and well told, but predictable and pat. “Mortals” is a “what if” story, based on the premise of “what if” an obituary writer, acting on misinformation, writes an obituary for a man who has not died? “What if” the misinformation came from the man himself? What would such a story reveal? Not a great deal, as it turns out, when the two men get together and reflect on the limits of their own lives.
Similarly, “The Chain” develops the implications of what would happen if a man committed an act of revenge for another man, who later feels compelled to commit an act of revenge in return. What if these acts set into motion other, unforeseen acts that continue in an unbroken chain of reverberations?
Another “what if” story in the third collection is “Bullet in the Brain,” a sort of writer’s revenge tale about a book critic, who, while waiting in line at a bank, cannot resist critiquing the dialogue of a bank robber, ridiculing his use of such language as “dead meat” and “capiche” as clichés, until the robber shoots him in the head. Wolff then explores in the moments before the critic dies all those things he did not remember, singling out one seemingly inconsequential incident in his youth, the kind of moment that only a writer would remember.
The ten new stories included here, which originally appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy, suggest a man who has accepted himself as a professional writer, who knows he can get well paid for publishing stories in such places, who is comfortably established in residence at Stanford University, who knows how to exploit the short-story form well, but who does not always challenge himself to go beyond his obvious competency.
For example, “A White Bible” is a conventional story that hooks the reader with pop-fiction suspense when a young female teacher is kidnapped by a man as she returns to her car after a night drinking with friends. However, the reader’s anxiety that the woman is going to be brutally assaulted is defused when the story changes into a thematic tale of cultural conflict. The kidnapper is a Middle Eastern immigrant whose son has been flunked in the woman’s class, and he is demanding that the teacher not have the boy expelled. She quickly takes control of the situation, even eliciting an apology from the contrite man.
The weakest story in this new set is “Her Dog,” an inconsequential piece about a man whose wife has died and who now cares for her dog, a dog that he ignored when she was alive. Although the theme is potentially significant, Wolff’s treatment, in which the reader is privy to the dog’s thoughts about how faithful he has always been, is sentimental and a bit banal.
There is, nevertheless, still some of the old Wolff evident in these stories. “Awaiting Orders” is a complex story about a gay sergeant who tries to help a woman whose brother, recently sent to Iraq, has neglected his duties to his child. The sergeant’s kindness and the woman’s tough hillbilly strength create a memorable confrontation. Similarly, “A Mature Student,” an encounter between a female ex-soldier and her art professor, an immigrant who betrayed her friends during the Russian invasion of Prague in the 1960’s, is a subtle exploration of the nature of cowardice.
In the final story, “Deep Kiss,” Wolff returns to his signature themethe superiority of the imagined life over the merely realas a man lives a “submerged life” parallel to his actual existence. This story’s theme is one that Chekhov explored definitively in his classic “Lady with a Pet Dog,” about a man who leads a double lifeone in public, full of conventional truth, and another that “flowed in secret.” Wolff’s stories, like many great short stories, reflect the secret of the form that Chekhov knew well: “Every individual existence revolves around mystery.”