The Stories Of Tobias Wolff by Tobias Wolff

At some point I added it on Goodreads and rated it 4. This is one of the first books I remember buying. But are they good, solid stories? Certainly. There's no risk involved in any of them, and you're unlikely to remember many. They're accomplished pieces that often feel like pale imitations, and they're hampered by their author's timidity and slightly debilitating self-regard. I can't help but feel that these stories were written with an air of being immediate classics they're self-consciously 'timeless' in a way that hopes to echo Maupassant and Chekhov and, yes, Raymond Carver.

All those things I'd earlier felt, that here were canonical American stories, that Wolff was a master, became problematic, not only because I'm now convinced I was wrong, but because I realise that Wolff also believes what I did, and that this is a big part of the issue. Reading some of these stories again was pleasurable but slightly disappointing. Then I read Our Story Begins, a collection of selected and new tales, which only confirmed my prior suspicion (although by now I realised that Alice Munro was, if not necessarily a better story writer than Carver, certainly equal to anyone I'd read working in that genre) regarding Wolff, that he was up there, that his stories were rightly anthologised en masse etc. Way back when I read The Night in Question, I considered Wolff second only to Raymond Carver as exponent of a certain type of story.

The Stories Of Tobias Wolff by Tobias Wolff