The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Night in Question by Tobias WolffJeanne Claire van Ryzin
Tobias Wolff. The Night in Question. Knopf, 1996. 206 pp. $23.00.
“Last night was a series of misunderstandings. I just want to . . . straighten everything out,” asserts a character in one of the fifteen short stories in Tobias Wolff’s new collection, The Night in Question, thus providing something of an emblem for this assemblage of contemporary tales concerned with how people manage their way through the inconsequential if not prosaic situations that ultimately constitute the history of our moral conduct.
His first book of fiction in over a decade, Wolff presents a collection of masterly rendered stories in meticulously honed form, elegant and exacting small works, subtly measured and perfect in tone. Neither cautionary nor didactic, these stories chart the path of life events which begin innocuously but unravel into complexity, extremity, and import. In “Chain” a father rescues his small daughter from a vicious dog only to have his actions begin a vengeful chain of events that spins out of control and eventually ends in senseless tragedy when he reluctantly complies to punish the dog’s owners. In “Mortals” a journalist neglects to confirm the reports of a death and is fired for writing the obituary of a man who, it turns out, is still alive. A woman’s brief nap in a stuffy car in “Lady’s Dream” reveals the moment in her youth when she made the decision to marry her husband despite their disparate personalities and histories, despite her other options. In “Powder” an almost divorced father—“rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty”—turns an almost-bungled vacation into something special by treating his skeptical and disappointed son to a magical (and illicit) Christmas Eve drive through snowed-in Pacific Northwest roads. Wolff demonstrates the tenuousness of our instinct for self-preservation in “Sanity,” in which a teenage girl, her father hospitalized after a breakdown, marshals whatever means she can to lure her stepmother to stay with her, and again in “Casualty,” in which a smart-mouthed soldier in Vietnam is killed just six weeks before he is supposed to return home.
Wolff’s stories are discriminating, resonant, compassionate, wry, lyric, and humorous tales about people trying to do the best they can, about how they sometimes succeed, and about how they sometimes don’t. [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]