Review: Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff | Books

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The experience is one that writing has always afforded Wolff, too. His memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, are, among their many other pleasures, definitive documents of fleeting self-knowledge. The former deconstructed the untruths of childhood, the latter the lies the author told himself about war. Wolff grew up - partly, ironically, in a town called Concrete - among more than his share of dissembling, most of it emanating from his runaway father (a figure characterised by his brother and fellow novelist Geoffrey as 'the Duke of Deception'). In view of this background, I once asked Wolff, in an interview, what he trusted most. He looked at me squarely - sharp eyes, bald head, round glasses, bushy moustache - 'Oh, the writing,' he said in his baritone, without hesitation. 'That's where I place all my faith.' </p> <div id="factbox"> <ol> <li class="inline"><b> Our Story Begins</b></li> <li>by Tobias Wolff</li> <li class="inline"> pp379,</li> <li class="inline"> Bloomsbury,</li> <li class="inline"> £18.99</li> </ol> <ol> <li class="picture"><img src="http://web.archive.org/web/20080819163734im_/http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2008/08/14/ourstorybegins1.jpg" alt="" width="140" height="215"/></li> <li> <a href="鈥漢ttp://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780747597278"">Buy Our Story Begins at the Guardian bookshop</a></li> </ol> </div> <p>To read the best of Wolff's stories - and all of those selected here fall into that category, including the 10 new tales that conclude this volume - is to repeatedly share in that faith, to feel the varied force of the possibilities of candour. All great short fiction trades in unexpected revelation; Wolff is such a master of this craft that even in rereading the surprises remain fresh. There are plenty of old favourites here: 'Next Door', in which a stiff couple lie in separate beds and are terrorised by the life of their neighbours, the sound of their fights and the ardour of their making up (not to mention the man's nocturnal habit of peeing over the garden fence), is still about as comic and poignant an examination of the hell that is other people as could be crafted in five pages, while 'The Rich Brother', in which a materially successful first son goes to pick up his younger sibling from yet another failed commune, unlocks everything you need to know about brotherly dependence and rivalry and love.</p><p>'Sentences are factual,' Gertrude Stein once observed, 'but paragraphs are emotional.' Wolff has long taken that knowledge to heart. His paragraphs, their rhythm, are things of great care. This is the opening to 'Deep Kiss', a new and remarkable story of first love: 'When Joe Reed was a boy of 15, his craziness over a girl became such a burden to his family, and such a curiosity to the small town where they lived, that his mother threatened to pack him off to his married sister in San Diego. But before this could happen Joe's father died and his mother collected a large sum from Northwestern Mutual, sold the family pharmacy, and moved both Joe and herself to California.'</p><p>No word in that paragraph is not putting in a full shift, but it is the trajectory of it, the change in register from love to death to practicality, that gives it its pull. How could you not want to find out what becomes of Joe Reed, whose whole life has already been mapped out in the gap between those two sentences?</p><p>In the best sense, there is a powerful suggestion of utility in Wolff's fiction. He believes, you guess, his stories to be of use in getting at the truth of things. You'd be hard pressed, in any case, to find a more cogent understanding of the responsibility and toughness of being a parent than 'Nightingale', in which a father is taking his son to the military academy he believes will make a man of him, a place his son has no wish to go to. In the course of their drive, and on arriving at the school, the father begins to understand the delusions he has always lived under and feels for the first time the hardest of parenting lessons - the idea that his child understands more about his life than he does. He watches his son walk across the parade ground, trying to keep step with the cadets. 'The distracted saunter he kept breaking into wasn't an accident of age, something to be outgrown or overcome; it was, in truth, nothing less than Owen himself.'</p><p>That 'in truth' crops up from time to time in these stories. That you always believe it gives Wolff's writing its great charge. As he well understands from his own growing up, though, there is no clear line from knowledge to wisdom; decisions have a life of their own. In 'Nightingale', Owen's father realises he has just stolen his son's childhood, but that doesn't stop him driving home.</p> <div id="history-byline" class="send"> <div class="send-inner"> <div class="share-top"> <h3>About this article</h3> <span><a class="sendbyline">Close</a></span> </div> <div class="section"> <h1>Review: Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff</h1> This article appeared in <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080819163734/http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver" name="&lid={historyByline}{the Observer}&lpos={historyByline}{3}">the Observer</a> on <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080819163734/http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2008/aug/17" name="&lid={historyByline}{The ObserverSunday August 17 2008}&lpos={historyByline}{2}">Sunday August 17 2008</a> on p23 of the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080819163734/http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2008/aug/17/review/features" name="&lid={historyByline}{Features and reviews}&lpos={historyByline}{1}">Features and reviews</a> section. 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Review: Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff | Books | The Observer