The following first appeared in the Sunday Business Post…

Tobias Wolff has written memoirs that cross over into novelistic terrain (This Boy’s Life, In Pharaoh’s Army), short novels that merge with memoir (The Barracks Thief, Old School), and, as a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University for 17 years, has mentored such luminaries as George Saunders, Jay McInerney and Alice Sebold. Despite this, the Eng-lit history books are most likely to garland him as a master of the American short story.

Wolff once declared that his fidelity to the short story form can be attributed to his belief that it’s more forgiving than the 300-page haul. He was being cute. If the novel is sometimes defined as a long work of fiction with an inherent flaw, the short story is, if anything, even more exacting, requiring economy, precision engineering, and the sort of lateral leaps of faith that lift a yarn from the ordinary to the transformative in the final act.

Almost every tale in Our Story Begins, a collection of his finest short fiction plus ten new titles, testifies to Wolff’s virtuosity, establishing character and scenario in the opening pages, quickly building narrative momentum, and culminating in a moment of unexpected satori. One pictures a chess master at work, meticulously plotting moves that will end in an audacious sweep of the board.

He might have been tagged as a dirty realist in the ’80s, but Wolff’s parables frequently enter the realm of the strange and metaphysical. He revels in his characters’ capacity to surprise themselves and the reader, freeze-framing stalled souls at the point where circumstances force them to commit life-changing acts that are by turns bizarre, reprehensible, and sometimes heroic.

For example, the coked-up ’70s swinger party in ‘Leviathan’ breaks wide open in its second half to admit a redemptive fable about a handicapped boy and a malevolent whale. ‘In the Garden of North American Martyrs’ snapshots a mild academic who unexpectedly harangues faculty suits with graphic descriptions of the torture of Jesuit priests by Iroquois tribesmen. ‘Bullet in the Brain’ tips its hat to Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and anticipates David Foster Wallace’s ‘Good Old Neon’ by charting a cynical book reviewer’s moment-of-death flashback in almost cinematic prose.

And if many of his stories are morality plays about stupid white men with access to guns and blunt objects (‘Hunters In The Snow’, ‘Soldier’s Joy’, ‘The Chain’), or one-act dilemma-dramas in which rogue males do the wrong thing and think themselves into feeling good about it (‘The Rich Brother’, ‘Desert Breakdown, 1968’), Wolff can also evoke the aching tendernesses of puberty and adolescence (‘Flyboys’, ‘Two Boys and a Girl’, ‘Smorgasbord’).

He’s also funny as hell when the mood takes him. ‘Next Door’ manages a satirical riff on picket fence politics that incorporates a pyjama farce worthy of Doris and Rock directed by Ang Lee:
“I don’t mean for it to happen but before long old Florida begins to stiffen up on me. I put my arms around my wife. I move my hands up onto the Rockies, then on down the plains, heading south.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘No geography. Not tonight.’”

Wolff’s new stories have their work cut out matching his greatest hits, but there are several contenders for future classic status, all of them preoccupied with separation and mortality (‘Her Dog’, ‘Down To Bone’, the haunting ‘Nightingale’). The reader walks away from Our Story Begins with a vague but persistent sense of aftermath, an unsureness as to whether we’ve heard some of these tales in a bar, dreamed them, or have somehow known them all our lives.

Wolff was in the country recently doing press for Our Story Begins. There’ll be an interview in a forthcoming Hot Press, but while we were talking, he registered the titles of his top five favourite short stories with the Revelatorium’s chief librarian. Enjoy.

1. ‘The Dead’ – James Joyce

2. ‘The Lady With A Dog’/‘Gusev’ – Anton Chekhov

3. ‘Cathedral’ – Raymond Carver

4. ‘In Another Country’ – Ernest Hemingway

5. ‘Good Country People’ - Flannery O’Connor