Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff
This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move around the same central themes, exploring them in different ways so as to extract every possible nuance from them. Wolff’s interest throughout is morality, in particular the way we handle difficult moral choices (difficult because the evidently ‘wrong’ choice usually promises a better immediate return); the results of that interest are 31 tales, all set in America, which together make a profoundly affecting statement on the privileged yet fraught task of being human.
In This Boy’s Life (1989), one of his two memoirs, Wolff describes how he cheated his way into a top boarding school as a teenager to escape his abusive stepfather (he was found out and expelled after two halcyon years). Unsurprisingly, then, deceit is a constant presence in these stories. In ‘The Liar’ a boy uses deceit to numb the pain of losing his father; at every opportunity the otherwise pleasant child tells embarrassing lies, and his exasperated mother cannot see that he is trying to shrug off the reality of his situation. In ‘The Other Miller’ a soldier allows his comrades to believe, incorrectly, that he has just lost his mother, because this will allow him some compassionate leave; the twist is that his mother has, in fact, died, and it seems as though he probably knew this and was lying chiefly to himself, again to avoid grief.
The military, another part of Wolff’s past, features regularly, and the shadows of baleful patriarchs lie across the whole collection.
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