Customer Reviews

The Night in Question: Stories

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First let me just state that the whole of The Night In Question by Tobias Wolff is really great. Each story is written in such a way that you feel like someone really familiar is just talking to you -- face to face -- and you don't want to leave.

Second, if you can't read the whole book of short stories for some reason (you would really need a good one), then you need to spend some time reading the last story in the collect, Bullet in the Brain. I read this story in another collection of short stories by contemporary authors, and it's always been in the back of my head as one of the best. I just finished reading The Night in Question, and Bullet in the Brain was the ending of Wolff's collection. Having the chance to read the story again without seeking it out was great.

Essentially, Bullet in the Brain is about a man who just can't shut-up during a bank robbery. But then the ending pretty much slaps you in the face because Wolff took one incident that would basically end any story and just moves it right along. I would have to tell the ending of the short story in order to explain this -- and I really don't want to -- but believe me, it's the most creative and interesting ending to a short story like itself.

I was lucky enough to see a reading performed by Wolff at my university, and I will never forget the author's ease with the audience, and his smooth readings. Like he knew us all, and we knew him, and the story he wrote was meant just for us.

Before I picked up this book I was only vaguely aware of Tobias Wolff, never having, as far as I can recall, read anything of his. I did remember that he had written a memoir of his peripatetic childhood that was praised probably fifteen years ago. I was unprepared for the power and grace of this collection of short stories published in 1996. A little research on the Internet tells me that Wolff is primarily a short story writer -- he has certainly found his niche in that, although I gather he has recently written a novel -- and is a professor at Stanford. But, most of all, he is a born story-teller. This is not to say that one is not also aware of the lapidary quality of his writing. My point is that even absent his writing skill he would still be someone you'd want to engage in conversation, or rather someone you'd like to sit and listen to as he spins yarns about the mundane. The mundane is his subject, but like all good writers, he puts it in such a perspective as to make it new and insightful.

Others before me, here at Amazon, have written about certain of the short stories here. The stories' subject matter is, generally, that of youth and young adulthood, and most importantly, about observation. His protagonists seem to have a preternatural writer's eye, which is part of what I look for in fiction. That's one of the great things about a great writer -- that ability to see things in ways most of us don't.

My favorite story? Probably 'Firelight,' about a boy and his hapless but courageous mother who go to look at apartments. Simple plot, but with deep implications about belonging, what home and family is, and about hope. The coda of this story, with the little boy all grown up and with a family of his own, tells us, as so often in Wolff's stories, how childhood experience colors our adult lives. Beautiful. I suppose now I'll have to go and read everything Wolff has written. Nice to contemplate.

Scott Morrison

For fans of Raymond Carver, who wonder how his prose might have evolved had he not died in 1988, "The Night In Question" provides a possible glimpse. Wolff and Carver's close friendship is well-documented. And although Wolff is his own man and my favorite living writer, I believe that there's a tangible link between Carver's final stories, such as "Blackbird Pie" and "Errand," and Wolff's recent work. Wolff keeps Carver's legacy alive in a totally original, compelling way. I have read "The Night In Question" no less than four times. I have listened to the abridged audio version (abridged in the number of stories only) 7 times. There is a sheer mastery of the short story form here that astounds me. Bob Dylan once said of Gordon Lightfoot: "Every time I hear a Gordon Lightfoot song, I wish it would never end." I can imagine Carver saying the same thing about Wolff, for similar reasons. This book makes a great gift and is required reading for anyone serious about the art and craft of short fiction. I wished every story would never end.

I've only read Tobias Wolff's short stories--both this book and the ones from "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs"--but this collection has continually left me speechless. Story after story focuses on the everyday happenings of mostly "ordinary" people with an attention to detail that reminds me of eastern poets. Yet Wolff blends his take on things with a distinctly "American" flavor--that is, he's an American writer at his best. Stories like "The Chain" and "Bullet in the Brain" are emphatic in their declarations of the human condition. After reading many of them, I couldn't wait to share some particular passage or insight with a loved one--or a stranger, for that matter. In this collection, moreso than "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs", I got the distinct impression of a vibrant, funny, quietly wise writer who--as Holden Caulfield from "The Catcher in the Rye" might have said--I really wish were a personal friend.

"The Night in Question" is one of the best short story collections I've ever read. Tobias Wolff understands fully what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he said, "Action is character." Wolff takes the reader's breath away not through twists of plot, but through his extensive knowledge of the human mind and heart, and how different minds and hearts work at cross-purposes. He knows the dirty little secret behind every human existence: because we are not each other, we betray each other. He knows why, in the title story, a woman is deeply offended by a sermon while her recovering alcoholic brother finds it completely inspiring; he knows why, in "Firelight," a woman can't wait to flee an apartment she came to see about renting, while her young son wants to stay there forever. Wolff is a master at following the labyrinthine mental paths people take to justify their actions to themselves, to the point where much madness makes divinest sense. I found myself crying, "Fool! Fool!" at Wiley, the self-deluding, lovelorn protagonist of "The Life of the Body," and my jaw dropped at the superbly ironic final sentence of "The Chain," a brilliantly original variant of Patricia Highsmith's "Strangers on a Train." Above all, Wolff understands the profound isolation of being a human soul trapped in an individual body; at one time or another, everyone has felt like Joyce, the main character of "Migraine," that, "In fact, everyone was alone all the time, but when you got sick you knew it, and that was a lot of what suffering was--knowing." These stories deserve to be anthologized forever and taught in every serious school of writing in this country.

If this book were written by many contemporary American writers, it would be by far their best. However, when you're Tobias Wolff, you've got to be cognizant of the fact that you've done better. While this collection demonstrates the range of Wolff's talent, his ability to shed light on so many different individuals, and his mastery of the short story form, his true gift of articulation is more evident in earlier works, specifically, In the Garden of North American Martyrs. If Nabokov's writing is like someone dumping gooey chocolate syrup and crushed Oreos on a dollop of vanilla ice cream, Wolff's prose is as clear as a glass of water. Hemingway might have aimed at such clarity, but Wolff got it in Martyrs. The Night in Question warrants rereading no doubt. Some of his sentences are just gems and do things that any writer knows it's tough to make language do. Wolff also manages to create whole characters in 3 inches of print (and none of his books have more than 400 words to page) and makes their dialogue resonate with disturbing familiarity. The Night in Question, like all of Wolff's work - The Wolff Pack - will bite you, but if want to be consumed, check out some of the earlier stuff.

Tobias Wolff's 14 stories in this collection is quiet, spare, measured - and absolutely stellar. Wolff can take a mundane, everyday experience and thru his meticulous craftsmanship dig into the depths to mine it for every nuance of emotional significance. Nothing is present in any of his stories that doesn't serve a purpose: not a dog, a twig, a sweater, or a smile. Everything moves the stories forward and shows us more about each character and his/her relationship to others. "Firelight," a story I've now read several times, is my favorite: a boy and his single mom, stranded in a university town, spend their weekends looking at houses and apartments for rent, knowing they can't afford any of them. At the end of the long day, they're invited inside the last house, one where a university professor lives with his wife and daughter. The story, told from the boy's POV, is bittersweet and focuses on a sense of being an outsider to the comforts of home, the warmth of the fireside - but he realizes that all is not as it appears within this family that he still envies.
Absolutely wonderful collection.

Reading the stories from "The Night in Question", I noticed close similiraties of his works to the ones of Anton Chekhov. Especially the first one, "Mortals". To tell the truth, I always thought that today's American Literature has only a-la Stephen King and Sydney Sheldon authors. It turned out otherwise. Tobias Wolff's book is so nice to read, that I even caught myself wishing to try and translate it into Russian. I'm sure Tobias Wolff is an international author.

After Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff is usually tagged as the minor partner in the pioneers of "dirty realism", a fairly meaningless term which was used to denote a new orthodoxy of somber and minimalist fiction about blue-collar American life. Having read all three, I think Wolff is actually the better writer. His stories are richer and more complex than Carver's in terms of their characters and themes, and they're more accessible than Ford's. Those collected here are fine examples. The plots are often simple; the incidents and settings are everyday, you might even say mundane. Yet in even the smallest moments from the most ordinary lives, Wolff skillfully illuminates the larger forces that animate them: love, desire, revenge, regret, vanity, hope and gratitude. Time and again, in the space of a paragraph or even a single phrase, the story turns, escalates, opens up, reveals itself as concerned with something far more substantial than you might have sensed. You can fall through a moment of banality and find yourself in a story with the density of a planet. The economy with which Wolff manages this is sometimes breathtaking, as in "Lady's Dream" and "Bullet in the Brain" which lay bare entire lives in the space of a few pages. Every story here is excellent, but three stood out for me: "The Life of the Body", in which a civilized school teacher is unable to resist the siren songs of sex and violence; "The Other Miller", which explores the relationship between a young soldier and his estranged mother; and "The Chain", a three-act suburban tragedy with the corny arc of a Hollywood screenplay, but which still manages to be moving because at its heart there's truth. That seems to be the key to Wolff's work. It's the one thing you just keep noticing: there isn't a single climactic moment that doesn't ring true.

I liked this collection but, don't kill me, I thought In The Garden of the North American Martyrs was better. Maybe it's my imagination or something about the timing of my reading each, but with The Night in Question I thought that at times Wolff was packing too much into his sentences, too much insight. It was all trenchant observation and inspiration, but those pockets of narrative threw the rest of the story off kilter for me and detracted from what I liked so much about In the Garden: that the stories are so simple and -- within that -- so elegantly complex. This could be my imagination; I'm not sure.

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. But I second everybody who said Wolff takes ordinary occurrences and portrays them beautifully and, as the pieces come together, with so much significance. Thanks also to the person who mentioned Carver. I agree, it would have been nice to see his writing mature.

If you haven't read any of Wolff's books or are thinking of getting this book, definitely do. Buy In the Garden too.