In the Garden of the North American Martyrs is Tobias Wolff's stunning first collection of short fiction. Through these gracefully evoked tales, Wolff touches the heart of the human condition and speaks in a voice that is sincere, original yet familiar—a voice that sounds as if it must last.

His careful, simple prose style is often deceptive. His stories' complex levels of meaning are covered by a delicate veneer. His metaphors reach deep into the imagination. In “Next Door,” Wolff moves subtly in and out of the lives of his character. The sounds of domestic intranquility coming from next door lead the main character to think about other proximities, other geographies, which include the body of his invalid wife. He begins to think about those places that are not on the map, lost cities, “white trees in a land where no one has ever been.” Perhaps all of these are really no further away from him than next door.

The characters on whom Wolff focuses manage to gain our sympathies, but slowly, slowly, Wolff reveals them to themselves and then to us. A pair of hunters let their wounded friend bleed and freeze as they expose their own pathetic selves to each other, lose track of themselves, and make a wrong turn on their way to the hospital. An English professor, entering the world of guilt and sorrow, is genuinely touched by a woman, hairless from chemotherapy treatments. He is moved that her life has been somehow saved by a poem (by a McKuenesque poet) that had given her the strength to survive. His experience challenges his own way of thinking, his own habit of passing judgments on other people, until he must become the one “to sit in the front of the church” and be watched by others. Wolff's characters, like the nameless narrator of “Smokers,” are “those who knew that something was wrong but didn't know what it was.”

The author does not moralize, though his concerns are usually moral in nature. His characters are Everymen, like Davis in the brilliant story, “Worldly Goods.” Davis, victimized in a harmless automobile accident, must deal with a claims adjuster, a modern version of Knowledge, who gives Davis the kind of advice he will need to get by in the world, that is, to screw before he himself is screwed. Davis stands on moral principle, but that is not enough. A friend tells him, “Nothing is good enough for you.” Davis cannot see beyond the surface issues: he will drive his life the way he resolves to drive his maimed automobile “the way it was until it fell apart.” And, ironically, his car is stolen from him, the way all our worldly goods are, in time, taken from us. In “Passengers,” this theme is reprised once again: if a person must change his ways, what if he “wasn't sure just what was wrong with his ways?” We may admire the heroine's ability to see through her pathetic lover in “Face to Face,” but what she sees never really goes beyond the heart of pity. We know that she is coming face to face with herself, deciding, as her lover has, “always to be alone.” But does she know this? It is a process, writes Wolff, that might “take forever.” For characters who can never “imagine things coming together,” conversely, they must see things “always falling apart.” How difficultly or belatedly they will come to know (as Vernon does in “Poaching”) if ever they have “been offered an olive branch and were not far from home.”

So “Mend your lives.” “Turn from power to love,” the feeble history teacher of the title story advises us. And Wolff responds poetically: how do we do so in a world where our own hands seem to be things we are holding for someone else? To protect us is the insulating power of lies. As Wolff demonstrates in “The Liar,” lies, like fictions, sometimes bring people closer to the truths—in this case, that people do have something in common with each other in their relishing of lies and in their loathing of lies—“a shared fear.”

Many of the stories of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs end on an introspective note. The narratives filter down to a moment alone with a character, who may be sitting alone in a closet, smoking a joint or lying on a blanket, dreaming up at the stars or lecturing passionately but with her hearing aid turned off. There they reflect and, maybe, learn. To us, they are specks on a large photograph that, when enlarged, reveals expressions on faces that are troubling, fearful, and human.