[In the following review, Van Ness offers a positive assessment of Doors.]

“Begin with an individual,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1926, “and before you know it you find you have created a type.” Fitzgerald’s “type,” a determined, upper-class young woman, courageous and attractive and independent, competing at life and love for the highest stakes—her future—, centered all his stories. William Hoffman’s fourth collection of stories, titled Doors, also presents a type, though one not so readily defined—an outsider who is not restricted to a particular class, race, or gender and who not only rejects traditional social values, keeping instead his or her own counsel, but also acts on distinctly personal beliefs. It is this intense individualism that distinguishes these men and women, renders them memorably large, and which in these new stories often serves as an obstacle to be overcome rather than as a source of personal salvation.

In Follow Me Home, Hoffman’s previous collection, published in 1994, he insisted upon what may only be called spirituality, a code of conduct centered not on religion so much as the realization that in the modern world all are wounded, lost, vulnerable. Consequently, what is required are the old-fashioned virtues of love, compassion, piety, humility, selflessness, and self-sacrifice. These earlier stories reveal just where “home” is as well as the idea that whatever the journey’s path, it begins and ends with the inner self rather than outward circumstance.

In a sense, Doors continues Hoffman’s examination of contemporary American culture, particularly Southern culture, by depicting the self-centered obsessions that define modern egotism and on which men and women act. For example, the narrator in the title story, a well-travelled and educated woman of breeding and class, considers herself above others and refuses to exercise simple manners when confronting those socially inferior to herself. In “Prodigal,” an estranged son believes himself better than his father, a fundamentalist preacher whose financial manipulations have built a television ministry and with whom he refuses to reconcile: “I watch these pinched and hungering people. He has learned well. His voice is balm, and they believe. Their faces lift and are made lustrous by hope and trust. His words salve their wounded spirits. He lightens their loads, and they straighten as grass rises from the weight of a departed foot.” “Landings” depicts a character badly burned during a Navy training accident whose bitterness causes him to withdraw from everything, shunning all human contact.

Occasionally, the obsession and egotism push the outsider to act violently, as in “Winter Wheat,” where jealousy and a strict religiosity cause him to murder a lower-school principal whose attentiveness to the narrator’s wife condemns him: “Every man should live by the Word,” the principal says. “‘And die by it,’” I say.

Presenting these and other individuals, Hoffman employs a sparse and concise style that owes to Hemingway rather than Fitzgerald. He would agree with the statement of another American writer, James Gould Cozzens, who wrote in a March 10, 1968 letter to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, “I’m trying to see if I can, through a fictional pattern meant to make them readable, lay out observations of mine on human behavior and the human condition using material taken directly or indirectly from my personal experience.” That is to say, not only do the characters in Hoffman’s stories stand out as humanly real, but they are also set in scenes and situations so recognizably those of Southside Virginia that they manifest Hoffman’s long residence here and reveal his keen eye for local detail and for actions that distinguish an individual.

Doors confirms Hoffman as a Presence in Southern literature and justifies his winning the Andrew Nelson Lytle and Jeanne C. Goodheart Prizes in 1989, the Dos Passos award in 1992, and the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction in 1995. The ten stories in this collection offer up a compelling look at human nature and act, as it were, as “doors” into who we are or, perhaps, what we have become here at the end of the twentieth century.