The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 January 2006
by Tobias Wolff
The title story in this small collection is a long short story or a short novella. Whichever, it is a moving and intricately written story of three young men in paratrooper training camp during the Vietnam War. It opens with the personal history of one of the soldiers, giving some background to his life and the family interactions that have brought him to the army. He meets two other green recruits, and they form a small clique against the more experienced battle veterans. Overall, the wandering perspective with which this story is written has an interesting impact in such a short tale. There are layers of personality and context that outgrow the length of the story, leaving the reader out in the depths of history and feeling. In Hunters in the Snow the reader meets three more men, hunters on a winter's afternoon. Here, Wolff draws three strongly distinct characters in a small space, and again manages to convey the ambiguities and complexities of human interaction and personal struggle. In the third story, Smokers, we are transported to a New England prep school, and the petty interactions that define that dog-eat-dog environment, a place and a time in which the stakes seem so high because they are so trivial. In Wingfield, the shortest piece in the collection, Wolff returns to the military, where meet again three men, two of whom reflect upon a narcoleptic soldier they knew back at boot camp. Poaching is a touching story about a family coming apart at the seams, and coming together again on the shore of a pond. A father and a son go to live in the woods of British Columbia, and mom comes to visit. The story has touches of the brutal, just like life. And touches of the sweet and gentle, just like life. Finally, in The Liar, Wolff tells the story of a sixteen year old boy who compulsively tells gruesome lies about his mother's health. This is another sensitive and dense story about the interactions between members of a family as it flies apart. In the end, Wolff makes the case for the personal history of a young storyteller, closing this collection of stories on a convincing note. In each of these stories, Wolff packs a lot of power and emotion into as small space. His writing is observant and insightful, casting a compassionate gaze upon what seems to be the extraordinary in ordinary life.
(Wolff was awarded the 1985 PEN/Faulkner award for the title story in this collection.)