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 implications he has invoked, never tries through superficial reductions to suggest that misfortune and grief are finally mere absurdities. His people fall victim to the ridiculous, of which he has a strong sense, but they are always something more than clowns and never altogether innocents.

In other words, Wolff is neither sentimental nor cynical; he has a sensibility that presumes to judge some things as more important than others and some actions as more worthy. In writing informed by drollery and wit, he insists on the intrinsic value of just about anyone's life, and on the dignity of ordinary people who are often lacking in the irony and eloquent despair so admired by contemporary fiction. His refusal to patronize his characters and his almost childlike wonder at their tics and obsessions seems somewhat old-fashioned.

Wolff's approach to the inhabitants of his stories reflects a religious attitude, Christian and humanist, of a Catholic sort, and in spite of the humanism, one influenced by Jansenism. Certainly his is not the merciless Jansenism of Flannery O'Connor, whose “A Good Man is Hard To Find” manages to out-Calvinize Anglo-American Calvinist classics like Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”, the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and the Indian captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson. But a number of things about the world and the characters found in the stories in The Night In Question, taken together with some of his other work, lead a reader to the conclusion that an understanding of Wolff's work lies in the comprehension of its fundamentally religious nature.

Rather than representing freakishness or the failure of some social ideal, the condition of embattled, transient, post-exceptional America is simply another figure of the fallen world to him. Its echoing malls and highway strips are no more surreal or anti-human than the French villages of Georges Bernanos. Among them, men and women act perversely out of an impulse toward sympathetic magic, try continually to accommodate and emulate the petty absurdity of things, to balance the tormenting silence. Wolff's stories often seem to be about grace, sometimes accepted, more often denied or refused, mistaken for its opposite or presented in some dreadful disguise.

No one gets born again in Wolff's stories, but abscondings abound. Husbands, wives, children and especially parents, the heart's nearest and dearest dependants suddenly vanish. As the hero of “The Other Miller” reflects about what he sees as his mother's treachery:

Because it's true—everything gets worse. One day you're sitting in front of your house poking sticks into an anthill, hearing the chink of silverware and the voices of your mother and father in the kitchen; then, at some moment you can't even remember, one of those voices is gone. And you never hear it again. When you go from today to tomorrow you're walking into an ambush.

So to punish his mother and make her feel his grief, Miller joins the army. But when what he mistakes for good luck (or grace) gives him a chance he's been hoping for to forgive her, the joke is on him. Believing her magically restored to him, he finds she has gone again, for ever.

Over and over, we see his characters en route from day to day, ambushed by desertions. They are abandoned, like the mother and son in “Firelight” in which a small boy dreams of lost wonderful fathers, always trying on other people's lives in strangers' houses. Or, like Brian Gold in “The Chain”, whose vanished Jewish father is a mysterious lost link between dread history and the rough and ready Irish-Catholic world in which he has grown up. Or betrayed, like the boy in “Powder”, who, in the course of admiring his esteemed father's smooth-talking resourcefulness, suddenly recognizes the man's essential worthlessness. They are bereaved beyond repair, like Tanker's mother in “Flyboys”. Or widowed, like Miller's mother, or orphaned like Miller himself, or abused and orphaned in turn, like Frances and Franky in “The Night In Question”. And like these two, they are also sometimes estranged by madness, as are the sisters in “Sanity” and their unseen father.

None of the many separations seem to partake of the natural cycle of succeeding generations. Every rupture is untimely, bizarre and charged with raw grief and anger. So relentless are the themes of abandonment and faithlessness that the shape of the whole seems irresistible, an indictment against a beloved, absconded Creator, the One who left us long ago to our own depraved natures and our fallen world.

In the Christian scheme of things, the absconded Creator contrived a redemption before vanishing yet again. The Night in Question abounds with failed promises of redemption, redemption through love, invariably thwarted, through sex and its attendant placating lies, in the prevarications of guilty, failed patents, in the empty assurances that resound in story after story. In each other's unredeemed, helpless company, everyone waits in vain.

Another element that decisively demonstrates the religious element in Wolff's work is the repeated rendering of his character's pathetic attempts to act morally, to preserve a state of grace in a landscape apparently long surrendered to the Father of Lies, one where the mercy of God partakes, in Graham Greene's phrase, of an “appalling strangeness”. In the title story itself, the author lets all indirection slide and allows his spiritual concerns an unconcealed centrality. “The Night in Question” is a tragicomic dialogue on the subject of theodicy and Christian self-sacrifice, in which a feckless, tormented and drug-addicted young man delivers a word-for-word recounting of the fatuous, prefabricated Sunday-school morality lesson he has memorized from the sermon of his rehab programme's resident clergyman. His audience of one is the sister who has lived her whole life for little more than the desperate, hopeless love of him.

What may be the strongest and most moving piece in the collection is a Vietnam story called “Casualty”. It is a story for a stained-glass window, a Passion in cool terribilità. A procession of trapped, impotent young fools, good, bad and indifferent, enact the circumstances of an obscure crucifixion—malice, suffering, sacrifice, guilt and death—across the God-forsaken landscape of war. There is even a kind of final Deposition.

Tobias Wolff may be among the last artists of the post-Christian era to carry the bare, brutal implements of Calvinistic introspection among the tools of his trade, though, as an American writer, he has honest recourse to them as arte-facts of his tradition. His most recent book before this one was the Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, which won a Pen-Faulkner Award in America. In Pharaoh's Army is surely one of the most unlikely reminiscences ever written by a former Special Forces officer. It is a book of exquisite perception, written in prose to match, and, in its utter absence of self-justification or machismo, a single-handed act of liberation against every variety of war-related posturing. There is something both ironic and apt that American writing about war, having begun the century with the pagan vitalism of Stephen Crane and endured the mock-stoic puerilities of Hemingway, should now end with a voice like Wolff's, one that suggests the pilgrim, Christian, more closely than it does the utterances of the various ideological supermen and knowing egotists who have so often been presented as the thinking man's witnesses to modern war.

The title-story of one of Wolff's recent collections, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, is typical of the best of his work. In it, the tortures inflicted by deviously right-minded hypocrites, self-protective and cowardly opportunists and other such succumbers to contemporary modes are compared unfavourably with the straightforward pain-inducing methods of the warring Iroquois. While none of the pieces in The Night in Question quite reaches the sublimity of that story, there is no shortage here of firstrate writing and memorable observation. This author, who has managed to endure and survive a variety of lives of his own, is also “one of those”, beloved of Henry James, “upon whom nothing is wasted”.

Tobias Wolff is among the most gifted of today's writers, and irreplaceable for that reason alone. But his value is the greater for the cleareyed, nearly forgotten, moral perspective he reminds us to remember, one we may not have to altogether believe in to find useful now or in time to come. His vision is one of a universe in search of its Deus Absconditus, the One who conceals His face and scatters the portions of His grace like snares within paradoxes. Faith, hope, love—our only resources—are all mysteries of a redemption which remains itself a mystery. It is a bleak, demanding vision, affording not even the wine of despair.

Out of it, however, Wolff fashions work that is beautiful and wise. Work of such excellence, however dark its origins, renders our condition that much less difficult to endure, makes the world a bit less lonely and encourages us all to some degree, in the course of our separate passages. Reading Wolff is a comfort, a mercy and, not incidentally, a pleasure.