Wolff's New Collection: Epiphanies

There was a disconcerting moment as I began to read "Lady's Dream," one of the briefest but best pieces in Tobias Wolff's new collection of short stories. Was this going to be a dog story? Was it going to be a sly fable told from the point of view of, say, the family basset hound?

The scene is a stifling automobile ride: "Lady's suffocating. . . (her) head is getting heavy, and when she blinks she has to raise her eyelids by an effort of will," begins the story, as Robert, Lady's putative master and the driver of the car, tries to call her back from the edge of sleep.

Lady wins, and drifts off into a dream that soon reveals her not only to be Robert's wife of some 40 years but also possessed of the sad knowledge that she has spent her adult life with someone who is considerate and courteous to a fault, yet wholly self-absorbed.

Robert's passion is for order and predictability; he even wears a hardhat working around the house. You come to realize that Lady has suffered a lifetime of his "carefulness" and has watched their children "writhe under it and fight it off with every kind of self-hurting recklessness."

That early confusion - is it a dog or a woman? - is entirely intentional, of course. It is Wolff's effective way of dramatizing Robert's limitations as man and husband: In fact, he treats Lady as if she were a dog, while she finds solace in a dream that subverts their entire history together.

I wish all of the stories in "The Night in Question" (Knopf, $23) had the hard, ironic edge and the supple mix of past and present that characterize "Lady's Dream." Some of these 15 pieces do, and they are very fine indeed - "The Life of the Body," "Flyboys," "The Other Miller," "Smorgasbord." However, others ("Powder," "Sanity," "Migraine") seem one-note, minor-key performances that are less ambitious in addressing life's thorny ambiguities.

Wolff is best known for his two superb memoirs, "This Boy's Life" and "In Pharoah's Army," but he has also won the Rae Award for excellence in the short story for his earlier collections, "Back in the World" (just reissued in Vintage paperback, $12) and "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs," as well as the novella, "The Barracks Thief." This new collection seems to me unlikely to supplant either memoir in his fans' affections, though many of the best pieces clearly grow out of experiences recalled in those books.

Emotional landscapes

Wolff is particularly good at reinhabiting the emotional landscapes of young people. "Flyboys," for instance, is a subtle examination of the guilt experienced by the narrator for having carelessly rejected one chum, the sickly Freddy, in favor of the purposeful Clark.

He was too young to realize it, but he discriminated on the basis of social class: Freddy's end-of-the-road home harbors one "very unlucky family. Bats took over their attic. Their cars laid transmissions like eggs. . ." In contrast, Clark's parents were one of those "relaxed, handsome families who . . . did not get laid off, or come down with migraines, or lock each other out of the house."

The irony is that both Clark and the narrator come from homes where affection is in short supply, while the bookish Freddy is wrapped in love. Telling this from an adult viewpoint years later, the narrator doesn't avoid confessing the callow, even callous behavior of his youth.

While "The Night in Question" doesn't have the cumulative power of some the more memorable story collections in recent years (Norman Rush's "Whites" and Richard Ford's "Rock Springs" come to mind), at its best it achieves the same beautiful honesty that distinguishes Wolff's nonfiction.

Donn Fry's column appears Sunday on the Books page of The Times.