The Menace of Living with Yourself

...youthful follies are related across the gulf of time, through the lens of adulthood...

...He’d tried on his last suit, so to speak, seen himself rouged up and laid out, and listened to his own eulogy...

...In tales about childhood there are no child narrators...

...Self-correction is the imperative: The older man won’t let his younger self off the hook...

...Mary is an academic who has spent her career obeying the prime directive of political correctness: never offend anyone...

...The complexity of the narrative is the mark of Wolff’s recent work...

...She asks about their love lives...

...At this point, the wisdom of hindsight intrudes, and the narrator explains that this exaggeration was the first of several small betrayals leading to the night months later when Jane, putting on her shoes after “the fifth time we’d made love,” told him, accurately, “You don’t love me...

...I had to close my eyes to do that, and then I could see her, her solemn eyes and the heavy white breasts she would gravely let me hold sometimes, but not kiss...

...It was personal, it seemed to issue from her very privacy...

...By now, the moral is clear, but this is not the end of the story...

...When he visits the offices of the offending newspaper to prove that its report of his death was exaggerated, the narrator, who wrote the obituary on an anonymous tip, admits to his editor that he neglected to check the facts with his subject’s wife...

...He considers this a “form of courtesy” to the reader: “If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented...

...I just wasn’t up to it...

...Anders being shot—followed by a coda that serves as a counterpoint to the rest of the tale...

...After the college that gave her tenure goes under, she is desperate...

...His recent novel, Old School, draws on this experience...

...Back then he was labeled a “dirty realist”—part of a group including Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Ann Beattie...

...Once in the brain . . . the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of time to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, ‘passed before his eyes.’” As he dies, we learn the details of Anders’ life, his gradual transformation from a boy in love with literature and even other people into a cynical monster...

...In “Smorgasbord” an occasion for emotional treachery arrives when the narrator and a friend are taken out to dinner by the sultry Latina stepmother of a classmate, García, “the nephew of a famous dictator...

...Wolff makes the story a pleasure to read by weaving between sardonically funny set pieces and penitent reflections...

...He reflects: “We’re supposed to smile...

...And the best part was, he resurrected afterward...

...Linda, the narrator informs us, “wasn’t a lot older than we were...

...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Senior editor, “Harper’s” Tobias Wolff has been publishing short stories since the late 1970s...

...Many of Tobias’ first-person stories are in a retrospective mode too...

...The process of reckoning with the past also connects several of the selections in Our Story Begins...

...It consists of 21 pieces from three previous collections, plus 10 new ones...

...What happened was that a few journalists started reading short stories again, and decided that since they were reading them, it was a renaissance...

...He had dreamed up a way of going to his own funeral...

...But at the interview she learns that she has only been asked to fill a quota for female applicants...

...It was biblical...

...The story ends with the narrator excluding Freddy from a quixotic attempt to build an airplane with a third schoolboy—another unhealed wound...

...and This Boy’s Life, a chronicle of his growing up in the care of his mother and an abusive stepfather...

...The rest of the story is a layered telling of the man’s successive loves, his marriage and family, the fantasies he has harbored about the girl, and their botched high-school courtship...

...In front of a hall full of students, Mary launches into a factual and highly offensive explication of how the Iroquois, who once inhabited the land where the campus now stands, burned the Jesuit priest Saint Jean de Brébeuf alive, scalped him, and ate his heart...

...Though the hiring committee has already settled on another candidate, she is still required to deliver a sample lecture...

...Our Story Begins traces the arc of his career—with some airbrushing...

...I heard the silky rub of her stockings against each other, and breathed in a fresh breath of her perfume every time she moved...

...More often, as in “Smorgasbord” or “Bullet in the Brain,” we come to a conclusion—“You don’t love me...

...Moreover, Wolff admits in “A Note from the Author” that he has allowed himself “the liberty of revisiting . . . here and there...

...The story itself has the quality of a parable...

...Givens’ moral vanity concerning his blameless if humble life drives him to lie and then costs another man his livelihood...

...He is a person so warped by his trade that when he stumbles into a bank robbery in progress, he can’t help mocking the thieves for speaking in clichés...

...SOMETIMES ADULTHOOD delivers Wolff ’s characters not toward wisdom but away from it...

...They were realists in that they eschewed the sort of postmodern flights Donald Barthelme and John Barth popularized during the ’60s...

...Not yet, anyway...

...Few stories in this volume proceed as straightforwardly...

...In the book’s last piece, “Deep Kiss,” the theme is still selfbetrayal, and this technique is extended further: The beginning, when a man receives a letter informing him of the death of a girl he loved as teenager, is a kind of ending...

...Resurrection was what it was all about, and this tax collector had gotten himself a taste of it...

...When a former colleague invites her to try out for a job at a good Eastern school, hope flares...

...His brother, Geoffrey Wolff, a former “Writers & Writing” columnist for The New Leader, tells the parallel tale of being raised separately, by their father in The Duke of Deception...

...I let the light go out...

...Nothing merely young...

...She flirts with the boys, telling a naughty story about being propositioned by a man in a New York taxicab...

...The scene is comic, but it amounts to another betrayal—both of Jane and of the narrator’s own feelings...

...After dinner, the narrator and his friend are back in the dorm, suffering from stomachaches and colluding about how they will use the hundred-dollar bills Linda gave them as parting gifts to “buy a woman...

...at what we recall of our own passions, as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we’d fooled ourselves with and then wised up to...

...Three decades later another generation of experimentalists, led by David Foster Wallace and George Saunders, has made its way into the anthologies, followed by still more realists like Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li...

...Wolff’s wry joke is that by the time we learn this, and Anders remembers it about himself, the monster is dead...

...That summer, as soon as I got home, we were going to become lovers...

...The faculty members are outraged, yet in her defiance, Mary is finally true to herself...

...Wolff shows over and over in these stories how lies can be most destructive in their unintended consequences...

...Wolff forged an application to gain admittance to the Hill School and was eventually kicked out...

...Wolff’s impulse toward self-correction is not surprising, given that he no longer lists among his published works a first novel, Ugly Rumours, that appeared in Britain in 1975...

...Asked by the Paris Review in 2004 whether he had been par t of a renaissance in short-story writing, Wolff answered, “No, no, the short story was never in any trouble...

...Feeling guilty, Givens takes him to lunch, where, in an O. Henry-style twist, the narrator realizes the undead man had sent the tip himself: “There was nothing in what Givens had done that I couldn’t make sense of or even, in spite of myself, admire...

...He has, for example, written two memoirs: In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), about serving as a soldier in Vietnam (the setting as well for Ugly Rumours...

...Wolff thus presents himself as a man struggling with a younger self—the “I” who threatens to turn you away—and this is reflected in much of his fiction and nonfiction...

...The crime is not the “sweet fraud” but failing to remain true to an attainable, if romantic, ideal...

...Mortals” hinges on the obituary of an IRS employee named Givens, who is still alive...

...The narrator of “Flyboys” recalls witnessing the deterioration of his friend Freddy’s family life after the death of Freddy’s elder brother...

...The narrator, looking back at his boarding school days, describes a hometown girlfriend, Jane, who has sent him a picture of herself: “[I was] unable to imagine her from it...

...Wolff now seems simply an elder statesman of traditional American short fiction...

...The editor promptly fires him...

...It didn’t reach me as just a smell...

...Or, one is tempted to say, the menace of living with yourself...

...And their realism was “dirty” because their characters tended to live a few rungs beneath the class you would meet in the pages of such earlier realists as John Cheever or John Updike...

...That was the real point, even if he thought he was doing it to throw a scare into [his wife] Dolly or put his virtues on display...

...Their annoyance spurs one of them to shoot Anders in the head: “The first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions...

...In “Bullet in the Brain” we meet Anders, “a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed...

...Hoping to impress her with “my potency,” the narrator implies that he and Jane have already had sex...

...Freddy’s mother’s sorrow “opened up the view of a world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best...

...An early story that opens the new book, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” presents a character as disfigured by her trade as Anders and the obituarist, but this one is allowed a sort of redemption...

...Yet there was nothing foolish about what we felt...

...Later in the interview, he describes Raymond Carver’s work with a phrase that captures the appeal of his own: “the menace of everyday life...

...But the short story has been a strong literary form in this country since the time of Poe...

...his humor, his moral sense, and his restrained lyricism have been present all along...

...I had a promise, though...

...A similar sense of regret animates “Smorgasbord...

...Romantic temptations offer themselves rarely at all-boys schools...