Or the conclusion of “Chain,” when the reader knows more than the guy trying to provide comfort: He’d keep saying her name…Say it in the moony broguish way she liked…He would hit that note, and once he got her listening there was no telling what might happen, because all he really needed were words, and of words, Wiley knew, there was no end. Here, for instance, is how “The Life of the Body” ends: Many have endings that don’t really end, but open a new door through which the reader can get a glimpse of what is coming next.
Someday she was going to take passage on one of those ships, by herself or maybe with some friends…When she closed her eyes she could see the whole thing, perfectly Through the crazed Plexiglas she could make out some small islands and the white glint of a ship in the apex of its wake. The sky was clear, no clouds between her and the sea below, whole name she loved to hear the pilots say - the East China Sea. A nurse on a C141 med evac has trouble coping when she realizes the soldier she has been caring for is dead.ĭuring a lull later on she stopped and leaned her forehead against a porthole. Some have stutter-step endings that seem to go one way and then another and maybe a third, such as in “Casualty.” An American soldier in Vietnam is fatally wounded. The 15 stories in The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff don’t fit that at all.
Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.A friend of mine is very big on stories having a beginning, a middle and an end. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know.Ī young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. One of the sinuous and subtly crafted stories in Tobias Wolff's new collection-his first in eleven years-begins with a man biting a dog.
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