Tobias Wolff has already assured himself a place in the canon with
the publication of such books as Old School and his excellent
memoir This Boy’s Life. The recently released Our Story
Begins is a collection of his short stories, from early works that
have been anthologized elsewhere to the 10 new stories that conclude
the collection.
The works are arranged chronologically, and the first stories have a
contrived patness that can detract from Wolff’s always-precise prose. A
turning point comes early on, though, with the story “Flyboy,” about
two young friends attempting to build a jet plane. Here is the first
story that doesn’t feel like it was written for inclusion in a high
school English textbook, and there are few misfires in the stories to
come. “Her Dog” turns the simple setup of a man walking his dead wife’s
dog into an offbeat study of mortality and regret, via an imagined
dialogue between man and dog, in which the dog chastises his owner for
his lack of devotion: “You ignored her. She would call your name and
you would go on reading your paper, or watching TV, and pretend you
hadn’t heard. Did she ever have to call my name twice? No!”
Among the recurring motifs is an unflagging awareness of the human
capacity for deceit and self-deception. The collection’s most
explicitly bleak story, “That Room,” condenses that into four sobering
pages, in which an cocky young farmhand walks into a hotel room with
his youthful arrogance intact, and walks out with his worldview
irrevocably changed:
“That room—once you enter it, you never really leave. You can
forget you’re there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the
course of your life, yea even its length, will reflect the force
of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an
icy patch on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands
becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy
slide toward the verge, and then you remember where you are.”
Summing up the ultimate futility of human agency in three sentences?
Now that’s why Wolff belongs in the canon.