Deceit and dilemma
Simon Baker
OUR STORY BEGINS by Tobias Wolff Bloomsbury, £18.99, pp. 379, ISBN 978 0 7475 9727 8 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 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. These two aspects combine in ‘The Nightingale’, in which a father drops his delicate son off at a military school so that he can be toughened up. ‘Private Booth is late, sir,’ the humourless cadet says when they arrive; when the father explains that they got lost, the cadet is unforgiving: ‘I’m sure you have excellent reasons, sir. The fact remains, Private Booth is late.’ Bad fathers in Wolff’s work are usually wholeheartedly bad, but here it is more complicated; the boy’s weak compliance with his father’s wishes, and the departing father’s inner regrets about trying to change his son (‘Why shouldn’t he dream up poems, or songs, or whatever they were? Why shouldn’t he dream?’), create a wrenchingly tragic spectacle of mutual failure and unexpressed love.
There are no big differences between the older stories and the new — protagonists always face moral choices, and blunder through overlooked America without ever learning the rules of survival — but his recent work suggests an even deeper, more generous understanding of moral frailty. In his early story ‘Leviathan’ a group of middleclass hippies are portrayed as shallow and self-obsessed people who renege on major responsibilities to satisfy minor needs. In ‘Down to Bone’, a new story, we have a seemingly similar type of character. A son who visits his dying mother hires an inappropriately jaunty Miata convertible for the journey, and considers making a pass at the woman from the memorial chapel while his mother gradually expires. But this time there is touching redemption:
He had [...] a picture of himself enacting the most exhausted and demeaning of clichés. It offended him. It chilled him. He finished his beer, thanked the woman for her time, and shook her soft hand at the office door. He insisted on seeing himself out so he wouldn’t have her at his back, watching him cross the empty parking lot toward that gleaming, ridiculous Miata.
‘Great’ is an overused word, but Tobias Wolff justifies it. Our Story Begins is an essential book which demonstrates the enduring talent of a truly great writer.
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