Tobias Wolff's short stories [in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs] depend so heavily on dialogue and limited points of view that they remind me of the early J. D. Salinger. Wolff has a fine ear for the clichés of hippie wisdom, the jargon of academic types, the formulas of parental criticism, and the evasions of the unhappily married. Children appear frequently in these stories, but the focus is more often on insecure and immature adults. The effect is less Salinger than, say, Raymond Carver, with its special emphasis on passivity and sublimation. Several of the stories are a delight to read aloud, notably “Passengers,” about a nervous young man who picks up a girl hitchhiking with guitar and large hairy dog, and “The Liar,” about a boy who fends off the world by his compulsive and usually morbid lying. But the immediately engaging and winning manner of Wolff's colloquial technique is deceptive. These stories repeatedly turn on moments of cruelty, cowardice, and impure guilt.

“Hunters in the Snow” features the sadistic Kenny, who teases his fat friend Tub to the breaking point, gets himself shot in the stomach, and spends the rest of the story bounced around in the rear of a pickup truck on the way to a hospital they never reach. The third hunter is Frank, a typical Wolff character in that he fails to take any stand, siding with Kenny at first and getting drunk with Tub later, apparently because the confusions of his personal life (an affair with the babysitter) have made him covertly vengeful. “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brook” exposes the cruelty of a young English professor who cuts down a fellow scholar in a panel discussion and then indulges himself in an overnight romance with an ignorant young poetess. Wolff charts this progression from unconscious arrogance to uneasy guilt to self-pity and deception so believably that you wonder at the end why anyone ever thought the humanities made people humane. In the title story a woman who teaches history at a West Coast college is flown to an eastern university for a job interview, only to learn that the position isn't open and she must deliver a lecture (not her own) to complete the charade of a “nationwide search.” Instead of the canned lecture, however, she improvises from her research in American history a hair-raising account of how the Iroquois tormented their captives with red-hot hatchets, pitch, and boiling water. We are left in no doubt about who in the lecture room are the Iroquois and who is the captive martyr; but the stinging justice of her tirade only intensifies her hopeless position. The recurring predicament of a Wolff character seems to be fear of the self: fear of sexual aggression, of betraying half-hearted loyalties, of asserting authority. Between cruelties and fears, Wolff doesn't leave us enough to choose. He has narrowed his vision so far as to suggest gratuitous cruelty, and that needs to be tempered.