Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

LIESL SCHILLINGER reviews Tobias Wolff - Book Review - New York Times, March 30, 2008

To read a Tobias Wolff story is to sink into the soft seat of your grandfather’s strong, modest old Buick and let yourself be carried through an America of small towns, small joys, small struggles and small despairs — a landscape so familiar as to be invisible, the landscape of homeland. As each tale proceeds, unhurried, unjudging, the car slows, the turn signal makes its reassuring clicks, and the car glides without resistance into the drive, delivering you, consoled yet strangely disquieted, to the place you came from — a place you thought you’d left behind.

The well-chosen title of Wolff’s latest collection, “Our Story Begins,” is also the name of one of his early works of short fiction, published in 1985 in “Back in the World.” That story (not included here), set in San Francisco on the “10th straight day” of heavy fog, forecast the writer’s long, seemingly preordained career. In it, a busboy named Charlie who wants to be a writer sits at a coffeehouse, eavesdropping on two men and a woman whose conversation dances around their true subject: two of these people have betrayed the third. As they finish their first round of drinks, one of the men begins a new anecdote, saying grandly, “Our story begins.” Wolff shows the lie from the start: their story precedes them. Leaving the cafe, musing on the nested tales he’s overheard, Charlie hears a foghorn in the night. Exhilarated, he imagines himself on a boat on the water, disregarding the sound of the “solemn warning,” angling toward the harbor in the dark, “too watchful to be afraid … eyes wide open, ready to call out in this shifting fog where at any moment anything might be revealed.”…

Here you’ll find the unforgettable “Hunters in the Snow,” in which three men, Tub, Frank and Kenny — friends of the bruise-leaving-shoulder-punch variety — go deer hunting on a miserably cold winter day, setting out in a truck with a broken window. The simplicity of the language and the brutishness of the men’s interactions resonate as disturbingly in 2008 as they did in 1980, the year the story appeared. A farm dog creates lasting, disturbing mental images: as the men tromp through the snow, they pass a barn, and “a large black hound with a grizzled snout ran out and barked at them. Every time he barked he slid backward a bit, like a cannon recoiling. Kenny got down on all fours and snarled and barked back at him, and the dog slunk away into the barn, looking over his shoulder and peeing a little as he went.”

In “Down to Bone,” a grown son sits by his dying mother’s bedside. Flipping through a photo album, seeing his mother at her first communion, the son recognizes “the very image of his own young daughter. The resemblance made him homesick; it was that close.” He knows his mother’s father was a bad man, a troubling, violent parent. But in her last confused moments, transported by memory to her earliest, most trusting childhood emotions, she grasps her son’s hand and asks for “Daddy.” “It’s all right,” the son says by reflex. “I’m here.” Realizing that “he no longer knew how to be a son, but he still knew how to be a father,” he tells her: “Everything’s fine, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine.” Soothed, she whispers, “Daddy. … You’re here.”