Priceless miniatures - Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Published on Thursday 31 July 2008 13:15

TOBIAS WOLFF HAS THE GIFT OF poise, a rare ability, at its finest, to move a story around a fixed point, maintaining a graceful equilibrium, the sense that while the tale is in constant motion it will not teeter, lapse or fail.

This substantial collection, combining classics with stories recently written, displays that talent, honed over the course of 30 years.

In his brief, explanatory preamble he discusses the business of making such a selection in the first place. Should the stories appear exactly as they had when they first saw the light, or ought the author take the "liberty", as he puts it, with mock reproof, of perusing the text with a view to removing any offending superfluity, any clumsiness, any tic of imperfection? Wolff – as you guess he will – opts to prune.

Yet tics remain, and perhaps the odd clumsy superfluity (viz: the top of page 139, with a three-word sentence). But does it matter, this speck of dross on an otherwise beautifully polished tale, the (aptly titled) "Mortals"? Yes, Wolff is mortal. I am reminded of Leonard Cohen's lines from Anthem: "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." The author's fallibility brings a reminder of our off-kilter human condition.

The tried and tested 21 tales from Wolff's three already acclaimed collections are, above everything, a joy, and, like all shrewd artists, he starts with a banker. Cue "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs", one of the greatest of modern short stories:

"When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught." The sentence unfurls and already issues are raised about academic freedom, moral censure, the responsibility of the teacher, and, in the person of Mary herself, the question sharpens: What should one do about others' fates? About injustice? Mary incubates the question, taking years before she acts.

The suspenseful thread – that glistening filigree of conscience – worms through the story and through so much of what ensues in other tales, threading together seeds of self-doubt, regret and often, as in Mary's case, the chance to make amends of a sort, to kick-start life anew, to rustle up a defiant finale.

"A Mature Student" takes the matter of conscience further, and more explicitly, when a professor makes a confession to her student, an ex-marine, about something that happened decades before. The student's son is a serving soldier in Iraq. How easy it is, she thinks, to succumb, to do the wrong thing. She fears for his soul.

Wolff mingles large issues with everyday pettiness. In "Say Yes" he hands the reader the subtle x-ray of a marriage, as a row unfolds, a silliness got out of hand. In "Next Door" a couple spy on the horrible life of their neighbours. Here, stream of consciousness moves the story away from domestic triviality into dreamscape. This happens seamlessly, the rights and wrongs of the neighbours' outlandish lives invisibly melting away from the foreground, towards noises off.

Wolff's people are guided, and sometimes impaled by, the beckoning gleam of their own moral compass. One of the newer tales, "Her Dog", posits a rancorous conversation between a pet and the man looking after him. The departed was loved by each of them. But the dog attempts to pull rank, claiming greater fidelity and devotion. It's all a joke, with the serious purpose of raising the matters of guilt and forgiveness, a Wolff experiment (reminiscent of Donald Barthelme), that somehow fails.

Another failure is the feeble parting shot in "A White Bible", a tale that dissipates, uncertain how to end – in startling contrast to the final tale in the book, the powerful "Deep Kiss", which is one of Tobias Wolff's best ever.

It does the impossible – bringing before us all the richness of one life lived in its full, tumultuous, troubled turmoil. You feel by the end of 17 pages as though a novel has somehow been magicked into a phial, distilled and released in a pure, heady stream of intoxication. And, as in every other tale, there is no sleight of hand, no effusive language. Just that the bearings of one man's heart have been revealed and understood.

OUR STORY BEGINS BY TOBIAS WOLFF Bloomsbury, 379pp, 18.99