Our Story Begins brings together twenty-one previously published and ten new stories by a master of the form. Although he has also written two volumes of acclaimed memoirs, and a handful of novels, Tobias Wolff is usually associated with the renaissance of the American short story during the late 1970s and 80s. Yet births, no less than deaths, can be exaggerated. In his introduction to The Vintage Book of American Short Stories (1994) Wolff disputes the term “renaissance”, arguing that it implies a non-existent dark age. He is surely right that the American short story has had an unbroken line of brilliant practitioners since Edgar Allan Poe. In 1963, Frank O’Connor declared it America’s “national artform”. Wolff’s disavowal seems somehow fitting in a short story writer, not just because of its demureness (no race here for the Great American Novel), but also because of its attention to the neglected threads that might unravel the accepted narrative. Short-story writers are the craftsmen of minutiae, and close scrutiny can often reveal the reality of the pixels behind the illusory picture.

The generation of writers with whom Wolff is grouped, including Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, is associated with the rise of a “dirty realism”, a label sanctioned by Granta’s famous 1983 special issue on new American writing. The phrase described a movement away from the experimental fiction of the 1960s to a preoccupation with mundane lives and struggles in an America of diners and daytime television. That the new realism heralded a repudiation of avant-garde pyrotechnics and the use of pared down and up-front prose made it particularly appropriate for the short story.

Yet the short story form has a tenuous compact with verisimilitude. It communicates through the gaps between words, eschewing the elaboration of cause and effect, motivation and action. So much is left unsaid that the reader is often left unsure about the real and the unreal, the true and the false. This is one reason why the theme of deception pervades this collection, from the teenage boy in “The Liar” who compulsively tells stories of invented morbid illness, to the con man in “Two Brothers” who spins a yarn about a Peruvian goldmine. It is also why, at one or two carefully restrained moments, these stories threaten to teeter into strategic implausibility, even magic realism. In “Hunters in the Snow”, two of the friends seem to forget that their friend lies wounded in the back of the truck; in “Nightingale” (a new story) a father brings his son to a military school that, without any other pupils in attendance, seems deliberately unreal and ethereal.

“Words”, Joseph Conrad wrote, “are the great foes of reality.” Using fewer of them is not to forsake reality but to grasp it more faithfully. The impulse behind Wolff’s work is less realism than fidelism, a scrupulous faithfulness to truths that exceed or thwart direct representation, that can only be glimpsed askance, caught for a moment through the juxtaposition of anomalous conditions and descriptions: a bullied university lecturer at a bogus job interview launches into an unwelcome tirade about Iroquois brutality; a boy on a moving bus, with the driver asleep, sings songs of made-up Tibetan to the passengers “in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue”.

The short story, at its Chekhovian best, is like a pebble in a lake, a particular instance or event rippling into a reservoir of feeling and suggestion. This is why the short story has more kinship with the lyric poem than with the novel. It evokes a state of feeling, a suggestive or unsettling image, an evanescent or ineffable impression: three rosy faces after a cocaine binge, bent over a mirror, are like “well-wishers, carollers”, looking through a window “filling up with snow”; a bullet, tearing through a man’s brain drags “its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love”. In the manner of many poets, Wolff has chosen to prune and edit some old stories for this new edition, adding a prefatory Author’s Note justifying this decision. We can sympathize with the artist who, seeing an early work hanging in a private collection, grasps the opportunity to wield a paintbrush.

It is a sign that Wolff never settles into a single voice, milieu or governing technique. One or two of his early stories might seem a little over-reliant on the received template: spare, understated prose, use of free-indirect style, culminating in an epiphanic climax that heralds a rush of words. But one can sense over the collection, which is set out in chronological order, Wolff’s range and capacities broadening and stretching. The first section includes much-anthologized stories “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs”, “Hunters in the Snow”, “The Liar” and “Bullet in the Brain”, but the selection is weighted towards the mature work, with twelve stories from his most recent collection The Night in Question (1996).

Wolff is more of a fox than a hedgehog, not just in the reach of his imagination – which ranges from young boys to married couples, a group of winter hunters to a newspaper obituarist – but also in his aesthetic restlessness. The aspirant short story writer will learn much from Wolff’s technical expertise: his deployment of descriptive detail, the judicious economy of his digressions, his deft handling of suspense and timing. But one also marvels at his flexibility, his testing of new calibrations of irony, perspective and focus. Our Story Begins is an apt title for a collection that seeks fresh formal departures, slyly coaxing out the possibilities of the genre.

Wolff has a humane political sensibility. Even his most domestic and insulated stories treat exploitative power relations. Yet the new stories are shadowed by recent geo-politics. One of the finest is “A Mature Student”, in which a female college student, a former marine, distraught about her soldier son who is serving in Iraq, listens to a cynical Czech art professor relate her feelings of moral failure in Communist-era Prague. At the same time, Wolff is too cunning to be direct or didactic. “Awaiting Orders” looks like a story about the Iraq war, but it mutates into a more oblique treatment of the experience of being gay in the military. In “A White Bible”, a schoolteacher is forced into her car by the indignant Islamic father of a cheating student about to be expelled. But what initially seems like a rape or abduction turns into the scene of humiliation of the father. Such reversals are common, adding intensity and dramatic interest. “The Benefit of the Doubt” treats the cultural incomprehension between an American aid administrator in Rome and a Gypsy pickpocket. In this, as in many of the other stories here, the relationship between guilt and punishment, benevolence and exploitation, power and disempowerment, is not just inverted or destabilized but radically scrambled, leaving the reader with a queasy sense of moral vertigo.

An example is “The Deposition”, a subtle, layered analysis of character, class, gender and power. A San Francisco lawyer comes to the eastern town of New Delft to depose a witness in a medical malpractice lawsuit. Burke initially appears on the side of the weak and vulnerable, but he emerges as a bully, scornful of this small, decaying town and its exploitable inhabitants. He frightens a young girl as he walks behind her on the street. He does not actually say or do anything, as he points out when confronted by the police. Even though the story is written in the third person, the narrative voice deftly captures Burke’s mental processes and private thoughts, so we know that the girl’s feelings of violation are not ill-founded.

Not every story works. Occasionally the contrivance is too forced: the situation described in “A White Bible” builds up suspense compellingly, then strains credibility. But mostly these stories are a rich treatment of frustrated aspiration and emotional inarticulacy. The short story, unlike the metropolitan novel, has often thrived in marginal conditions, where powers of self-expression seem less assured. It comes more typically from the colonies than the imperial centre. In interview, Wolff has claimed that the short story is the “perfect American form” because of the “nomadic” aspect of American culture, both geographically and in terms of social mobility. Another explanation might see the American short story as akin to a photographic negative, inversely created by the national emphasis on success and achievement. America, after all, has given us the word “loser”, together with such exemplars as Walter Mitty, Willy Loman and Homer Simpson. Many of the short stories here feature the drop-out, the coward, the guilt-ridden, the loser. In “Desert Breakdown 1968”, a searing story about failure and betrayal, hope and delusion, Mark is tempted to run off with a passing film crew, abandoning his pregnant wife and child. He resolves to keep his “eyes open and his mouth shut, and after a while people would notice him”. Strategies of watchful silence are often deployed by the short story. There are many fine instances in this collection.

Tobias Wolff
OUR STORY BEGINS
377pp. Bloomsbury. £18.99.
978 0 7475 9727 8

Rónán McDonald is Director of the Beckett International Foundation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading. His books include The Death of the Critic and The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett, both of which were published last year.

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