ALR Summer Book Club: Our Story Begins

Wolff's latest collection features ten new stories, along with twenty-one oldies, and offers readers a quarter century of quality short fiction. His work, though arguably underrepresented in classrooms, remains one of the most unique and engaging examples of contemporary American fiction at its finest. Our Story Begins, like most collections, undoubtedly suffers from weak spots. Taken as a whole, however, Wolff’s stories are absolutely, and often inexplicably, both groundbreaking and transformative. All memorable writers, put simply, must approach the human condition from a perspective worth taking. That is, a perspective that reveals another small piece of the unexplored. Wolff, to be sure, accomplishes this—through technical and philosophical originality—while also giving writers and theorists a case study that demands diligent attention.

So yeah, that’s my two cents as a reviewer. As a writer, I find in Wolff’s fiction much more than this space, or my willingness, will permit me to discuss at length. I’ll confine this post to a few elements of craft and a few elements of criticism that particularly interest me, and hopefully it sets the stage for a more comprehensive conversation.

First, I want to say a few things about Wolff’s beginnings. The first few paragraphs of his stories are usually the most crucial. They provide the details of characterization that allow us to understand and interpret everything that follows. Wolff’s endings often correspond in some way to his beginnings. He often echoes, or makes us remember, something that we may have temporarily put out of our minds. These returns, I think, lend unity to Wolff’s narratives. They also provide the ammunition for the punches he delivers in so many of his stories’ last sentences.

This, on the other hand, is Tobias Funke.

The collection’s leadoff story, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” provides a good example of this. Mary’s deafness is briefly mentioned in the fifth paragraph, and it nearly disappears until the last sentence when she turns off her hearing aid “so that she would not be distracted again.” This sentence resonates, not only because it illustrates the extent to which Mary’s character has grown, but also because it returns us to that which we may have forgotten. The hearing aid—a simple detail, perhaps an example of Boswell’s “narrative spandrel”—resonates for the story beyond what it might have if Wolff hadn’t deployed it early on. The reason for its resonance, I think, isn’t simply that it returns. Nor is it simply that it gives the protagonist an object upon which to act out her transformation. The crucial point here, I think, is that the object itself undergoes a transformation. No longer is the hearing aid a symbol of weakness; rather, at the end of the story, the hearing aid is a symbol of strength. Mary’s handicap, essentially, becomes her advantage. She embraces her identity, her minority status, effectively enabling herself to stand up to the majority.

The simultaneous transformation—of both an object and a character—offers one way for Wolff to achieve narrative unity and resonance. In other beginnings, Wolff doesn’t rely on a single object. In “Smorgasbord,” for instance, the protagonist introduces the general motif of food long before the prospect of dinner at a buffet arises. He also draws class distinctions between himself and his classmates, and admits his possession of an insatiable appetite, all in the second paragraph. At the end of the story, the loss of his innocence corresponds with his purchase of satiation. Desire, like hunger, can only be satisfied through the possession of the material and monetary wealth that the narrator covets. We know this from page one, but the poignancy of the consequences foreshadowed at the beginning will only hit home in the last paragraph. Essentially, Wolff subtly foreshadows cause to subtly strengthen both cause and effect. The narrator experiences a short term consequence of his subjection to the perverse indoctrination of capitalism when his relationship falls apart; on page 225, though, Wolff also hints at the long term consequences of the narrator's experience: "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." Here, the narrator's voice suddenly speaks to us from the distant future, and yet, even this older and "wiser" narrator understands the futility of resisting the army of cultural apparatuses from which he must choose to accept either satisfaction and destruction together, as a package deal, or destruction alone.

Similarly, Wolff might introduce a character’s habit—his tragic flaw, perhaps—in the beginning of a story, which sets up its return and resonance in the end. In the fourth paragraph of “Firelight,” the narrator and his mother exercise the “power of looking” as they shop for unaffordable goods and services. This causes the narrator to worship appearances, and it results in his ultimate unhappiness at the story’s end. To really believe in something rather than its mere appearance, for him, is to “make it vanish.”

Another aspect of Wolff that I admire is his Chekhovian ability to maintain detachment and objectivity without sacrificing feeling or emotion. Wolff’s voice is never cold, nor is it sentimental. A few reasons for this, as far as I can tell: Wolff knows when to dive into a character’s head, and he knows when to stay out; he knows what information to give us, when to give it, and how; and he knows how to withhold commentary and let the action and characters (both major and minor) speak for themselves.

In “Hunters in the Snow” and “The Liar,” Woolf uses narrative detachment in two very different ways to achieve the same effect. Both stories feel distant, and both are deeply invested in their characters, but their degrees and methods of measured detachment are quite different. “Hunters in the Snow” works because Wolff stays out of his characters’ heads for most of the story. He zooms out and watches them slowly destroy each other. To hear their thoughts would be to diminish the effect of their mutual destruction. On the page, a character's thoughts lend them greater self-awareness and greater self-consciousness. If Wolff had brought it to our attention that Tub, Frank, and Kenny were aware of their individual cruelties to one another—or that they were capable of situational circumspection—then we might be more prone to pass judgment on their despicable actions. As it stands, we watch the wintry coldness of each characters' outer tragedy unfold without jumping into the warmth of their inner selves.

“The Liar,” on the other hand, demonstrates Wolff’s unparalleled ability to create perfect first person narrators. This entire story leads us, not to a transformation of the protagonist, but to the revelation of how deeply pathological he is. Rather than a turn, there is a no turning back. Like so many of Wolff’s first person narrators, the genius of the character development in “The Liar” is that the narrator’s acute unreliability is never clear enough to cause readers to give up on him. Wolff gives us just the right amount of information, such that we cannot accuse him of withholding or manipulating. He lets the narrator speak for himself, and it works because, despite his pathological lying, he is ultimately sympathetic toward his mother and utterly self-aware. The simultaneous detachment, drawn from the narrator’s objective, unsentimental recounting of the “facts,” not only makes for a fascinating character, but its juxtaposition with the narrator’s sympathy allows for the sadness of the inner story to shine through without seeming forced, manipulative, or predictable.

“The Other Miller,” my favorite story in the collection, works in a similar way. The point of view is close third person, but it feels like first person. Though some readers may anticipate the ending, this certainly does not diminish the experience of all that leads up to it. Like “The Liar,” this story is a journey into the mind of a character who understands—yet simultaneously rejects—his own situation. The slow, steady reveal of information—Miller’s relationship with his mother—juxtaposed with the action occurring on the surface—Miller’s diabolical plot to escape active duty—provides just the right amount of inner and outer story to make the ultimate revelation of the totality of Miller’s shock a powerful one. Wolff brilliantly stays out of Miller’s head unless it’s to tell us how nervous he is about getting caught impersonating himself. He also creates a convincing story by giving the two minor characters agendas of their own—they aren’t simply set pieces or devices. They drive the story because they are interesting, and their personalities and machinations distract us from the truth of Miller’s mental condition.

I think I’ve gotten long-winded, so I’ll wrap it up. I had hoped to throw some theory in—because there’s much here to be thrown—but alas, I’ll save it. One lagniappe I will add, though, is that Wolff’s stories are all immensely concerned with identity construction. Many of his characters are searching for ways to define themselves by first defining their not-selves. Crisis hits them when they run up against something that they don’t understand. Their first instinct is to fill in the blanks. If a blank clings to its vacancy, however, there arises a confrontation with the unspeakable Other. Besides its potential for theoretical musing, this also provides an interesting template for storytellers: confrontation with Otherness requires that the protagonist explain it away (fundamental misunderstanding) or become it (fundamental self-betrayal). After this choice, the protagonist fights a battle to maintain whatever sense of self in which the choice represents an investment. “Deep Kiss,” for example, follows a character’s perpetual misunderstanding of the other that ultimately results in his inability to define himself. “Desert Breakdown, 1968” follows one character who projects his dreams onto the other and thus causes his own downfall, and another character who accepts Otherness as unspeakable and thus finds the strength for self-preservation. “Next Door” also details two characters’ different approaches to explaining the inexplicable, and the last paragraph hints at the arbitrariness of all such approaches.

Anyway, I’m throwing in the towel now. All in all, amazing collection. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to the discussion!

Hubbs out.