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Friday 5 December 2008

Our Story Begins

Deceit and dilemma

Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff 

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 middle-class 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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