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A review by jennyshank
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff
5.0
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/mar/28/master-of-the-craft/
Master of the craft
Wolff's greatest hits so far share precision of language, humor, moral complexity
By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky
Published March 28, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
If any short story writer working today has earned the right to release his greatest hits, it's Tobias Wolff.
Wolff has been at the top of his game for a long time - so long that many young writers have probably grown old watching him hit homers while they sit on the bench, waiting for the guy to start whiffing and free up some space in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire and Harper's.
They'd better get comfortable, because after 30 years, Wolff hasn't taken his eye off the ball.
Aspiring writers could use his new collection Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories- featuring 10 new pieces and 21 of Wolff's classics - as a manual on how to craft a great story. Wolff's best stories share a precision of language, humor, psychological and moral complexity, and what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "heart," that indefinable quality that turns characters into living, breathing humans and arouses empathy in the reader.
Although some of the pieces have similar themes - stories of mother-son relationships or characters with a military background are common - they are never formulaic. Indeed, the most recent pieces find Wolff reaching out in surprising directions, including Her Dog, in which a man engages in a sort of telepathic conversation with his late wife's dog, and The Benefit of the Doubt, which is set in Italy (all the others are set in the U.S.).
Our Story reveals a definite progression in Wolff's career. He was good right at the beginning, but still managed to grow, in part by homing in on the subject matter that makes the best use of his gifts.
Some of the early stories in the book seem a touch watered down in comparison to the potent tales he's been writing since his 1999 collection, The Night in Question. For example, Leviathan is about a cocaine-fueled 30th birthday party, the action largely cycling around witty banter between two couples. It's well-written, but seems more like Raymond Carver's territory than Wolff's.
Even so, there are several great early stories, including the evocative, tension-filled Desert Breakdown, 1968, about a vulnerable young couple with a baby and another on the way whose car breaks down in a desert town on their way to L.A. to pursue the husband's show-business dreams. The Liar, a mother-son relationship tale, prefigures the story Wolff went on to tell in the memoir This Boy's Life. And in Soldier's Joy, Wolff began to explore the theme of one soldier's second-guessing his own actions and motivations that he would pursue further in the memoir In Pharaoh's Army.
The sweet spot of Wolff's story-writing career undoubtedly began with The Night in Question. Every entry in that collection was a marvel of humor, artistic control and human insight. Embedded amid Wolff's earlier and later stories here, they shine. (Our Story includes 12 of that collection's original 14.)
Contenders for the title of best of Wolff's best include the hilarious and heartfelt Smorgasbord, the powerful, condensed Powder and Flyboys, which perfectly captures the way children form and dissolve friendships based on instincts they can't yet understand, and how a child's apparently innocent decisions can cause pangs of moral regret that last for years.
Wolff's precise control of English puts many of us who thought we were using the same language to shame. Take the passage from Smorgasbord, in which a teenager at an elite boarding school has been invited to go out to dinner with the glamorous stepmother of a classmate who "was the nephew of a famous dictator." Also invited along is the uncouth Crosley, who suggests they take this ravishing woman to a smorgasbord called "Swenson's, or Hanson's, some such honest Swede of a name."
The narrator describes the scene there: " . . . some of the people around us had completely slipped their moorings. They ducked their heads low to shovel up their food, and while they chewed it they looked around suspiciously and circled their plates with their forearms. . . . There was something competitive and desperate about them; they seemed determined to eat their way into a condition where they would never have to eat again."
The story builds to an uproarious crescendo. I saw Wolff read Smorgasbord once; people in the audience were crying from laughing so hard. But then it pivots gracefully, heading into more profound territory.
"We're supposed to smile at the passions of the young, and at what we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to," Wolff writes about the narrator's remembrance of a teenage love affair. "Yet there was nothing foolish about what we felt. Nothing merely young. I just wasn't up to it. I let the light go out."
The complexity of emotion Wolff evokes within the space of a few pages, from hilarity to heartbreak, is often nothing short of astonishing.
The final section of Our Story features the new stories, and Wolff works out some interesting, diverse tensions in this group of tales. Although not all are as strong as those from The Night in Question, some clear masterworks stand out, especially Awaiting Orders, about a career military officer who has concealed his homosexuality in order to preserve his job. Wolff handles this subject with subtlety and vigor. Reading it, you appreciate the intelligence of the author, who has fully imagined the moral convolutions such a situation can engender.
Our Story may be the summation of Wolff's story-writing career to date, but as its title suggests, he clearly has more tales to tell, and thankfully for his readers, the undiminished storytelling gifts with which to tell them.
Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She also writes about books for NewWest.net. The author lives in Boulder.
On short story writing
"It's like spelunking, with a light on your hat. You keep going into different chambers until you find a chamber that seems to you to be the right one; you're descending into dark and unknown territory and you can never see very far ahead."
- Tobias Wolff in a Salon.com interview
Tobias Wolff
* What and when: Appears at 7:30 p.m. April 4 at the Tattered Cover, Colfax Avenue at Elizabeth Street
* Cost: Free
* Information: 303-322-7727
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
* By Tobias Wolff. Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95.
* Grade: A
Master of the craft
Wolff's greatest hits so far share precision of language, humor, moral complexity
By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky
Published March 28, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
If any short story writer working today has earned the right to release his greatest hits, it's Tobias Wolff.
Wolff has been at the top of his game for a long time - so long that many young writers have probably grown old watching him hit homers while they sit on the bench, waiting for the guy to start whiffing and free up some space in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire and Harper's.
They'd better get comfortable, because after 30 years, Wolff hasn't taken his eye off the ball.
Aspiring writers could use his new collection Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories- featuring 10 new pieces and 21 of Wolff's classics - as a manual on how to craft a great story. Wolff's best stories share a precision of language, humor, psychological and moral complexity, and what, for lack of a better term, I'll call "heart," that indefinable quality that turns characters into living, breathing humans and arouses empathy in the reader.
Although some of the pieces have similar themes - stories of mother-son relationships or characters with a military background are common - they are never formulaic. Indeed, the most recent pieces find Wolff reaching out in surprising directions, including Her Dog, in which a man engages in a sort of telepathic conversation with his late wife's dog, and The Benefit of the Doubt, which is set in Italy (all the others are set in the U.S.).
Our Story reveals a definite progression in Wolff's career. He was good right at the beginning, but still managed to grow, in part by homing in on the subject matter that makes the best use of his gifts.
Some of the early stories in the book seem a touch watered down in comparison to the potent tales he's been writing since his 1999 collection, The Night in Question. For example, Leviathan is about a cocaine-fueled 30th birthday party, the action largely cycling around witty banter between two couples. It's well-written, but seems more like Raymond Carver's territory than Wolff's.
Even so, there are several great early stories, including the evocative, tension-filled Desert Breakdown, 1968, about a vulnerable young couple with a baby and another on the way whose car breaks down in a desert town on their way to L.A. to pursue the husband's show-business dreams. The Liar, a mother-son relationship tale, prefigures the story Wolff went on to tell in the memoir This Boy's Life. And in Soldier's Joy, Wolff began to explore the theme of one soldier's second-guessing his own actions and motivations that he would pursue further in the memoir In Pharaoh's Army.
The sweet spot of Wolff's story-writing career undoubtedly began with The Night in Question. Every entry in that collection was a marvel of humor, artistic control and human insight. Embedded amid Wolff's earlier and later stories here, they shine. (Our Story includes 12 of that collection's original 14.)
Contenders for the title of best of Wolff's best include the hilarious and heartfelt Smorgasbord, the powerful, condensed Powder and Flyboys, which perfectly captures the way children form and dissolve friendships based on instincts they can't yet understand, and how a child's apparently innocent decisions can cause pangs of moral regret that last for years.
Wolff's precise control of English puts many of us who thought we were using the same language to shame. Take the passage from Smorgasbord, in which a teenager at an elite boarding school has been invited to go out to dinner with the glamorous stepmother of a classmate who "was the nephew of a famous dictator." Also invited along is the uncouth Crosley, who suggests they take this ravishing woman to a smorgasbord called "Swenson's, or Hanson's, some such honest Swede of a name."
The narrator describes the scene there: " . . . some of the people around us had completely slipped their moorings. They ducked their heads low to shovel up their food, and while they chewed it they looked around suspiciously and circled their plates with their forearms. . . . There was something competitive and desperate about them; they seemed determined to eat their way into a condition where they would never have to eat again."
The story builds to an uproarious crescendo. I saw Wolff read Smorgasbord once; people in the audience were crying from laughing so hard. But then it pivots gracefully, heading into more profound territory.
"We're supposed to smile at the passions of the young, and at what we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to," Wolff writes about the narrator's remembrance of a teenage love affair. "Yet there was nothing foolish about what we felt. Nothing merely young. I just wasn't up to it. I let the light go out."
The complexity of emotion Wolff evokes within the space of a few pages, from hilarity to heartbreak, is often nothing short of astonishing.
The final section of Our Story features the new stories, and Wolff works out some interesting, diverse tensions in this group of tales. Although not all are as strong as those from The Night in Question, some clear masterworks stand out, especially Awaiting Orders, about a career military officer who has concealed his homosexuality in order to preserve his job. Wolff handles this subject with subtlety and vigor. Reading it, you appreciate the intelligence of the author, who has fully imagined the moral convolutions such a situation can engender.
Our Story may be the summation of Wolff's story-writing career to date, but as its title suggests, he clearly has more tales to tell, and thankfully for his readers, the undiminished storytelling gifts with which to tell them.
Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She also writes about books for NewWest.net. The author lives in Boulder.
On short story writing
"It's like spelunking, with a light on your hat. You keep going into different chambers until you find a chamber that seems to you to be the right one; you're descending into dark and unknown territory and you can never see very far ahead."
- Tobias Wolff in a Salon.com interview
Tobias Wolff
* What and when: Appears at 7:30 p.m. April 4 at the Tattered Cover, Colfax Avenue at Elizabeth Street
* Cost: Free
* Information: 303-322-7727
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
* By Tobias Wolff. Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95.
* Grade: A