'Our Story Begins' by Tobias Wolff
BOOK REVIEW
A collection of stories from a master mason of short fiction.
Our Story Begins
New and Selected Stories
Tobias Wolff
Alfred A. Knopf: 380 pp., $26.95
THE novel, as a form, has a number of advantages over its narrative rival, the short story. It's a long-term companion. It offers a sustained relationship. You can take it to the beach or on vacation, and it won't leave you stranded halfway to Cancún. From the practitioner's point of view, the novel's chief advantage is that it is the more forgiving. You can take a lengthy detour in a novel and the novel, in the end, can still succeed. You can wax prolific on a minor subject and the novel will absorb it, like a snake swallowing a hog.
Not so the short story. When it's done well, the economy, the rigor, the precision that the form demands are hardly noticed by its consumer. But it is more difficult to write, in its line-to-line execution, than any other narrative conceit. And Tobias Wolff is a genius at it.
Wolff has been honing his short stories for 30 years. His mind, his wisdom, his timing and his wit cut through our stasis with the elegance of a world-class surgeon. The medical analogy is apt: These are stories that can save your life (if you are inclined, as I am, to believe that fiction is a kind of preventive medicine). At his best, Wolff conjures stories that etch your memory -- which is to say, they become a part of you. This makes him, in my book, a very great writer indeed.
"Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories" includes 21 stories from Wolff's previous three short fiction collections and 11 new ones, arranged, it would seem, in the order they first appeared in print. (All 32 stories -- and I emphasize all -- have been published in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Playboy and Esquire, the Walrus and the Missouri Review.) Wolff is one of our most anthologized short story writers; his seminal "Hunters in the Snow," "Mortals" and "Bullet in the Brain" show up, perennially, in college textbooks and syllabuses. Yet reputation aside, let me tell you why you should read this book:
