©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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Review by Charles Flowers
Based upon the 15 short stories collected in The Night in Question, the deep places in Tobias Wolff's heart were formed on the American West Coast in the 1960s -- even if his characters, isolated and self-referring, demonstrate very little sense of space and time outside their own heads.
Wolff's method of storytelling lies very close to interior monologue, even when more than one character speaks. A high school boy taking sly revenge on his best friend's girl, a teacher risking physical harm to chase a woman he knows only through drunken haze, a soldier stubbornly rejecting his mother with heartrending results -- often, the main character lives an obsession that suffocates.
These people are pulled so tightly askew inside that they can grasp the world in only one or two degrees of the available human spectrum. But if rarely admirable or likable, they somehow rivet our attention . . . for exactly as long as Wolff wants them to.
Such control, along with his fleet shifts from coarse speech to lyrical images, creates uncommon art from lives marginalized by circumstances beyond their control or manipulated by inept, self-centered, or otherwise distant authority figures.
The most skillful stories in The Night in Question are such character portraits in four dimensions. By contrast, two tales in which the plots bang and whistle quickly lose credibility, constricted by blatant blueprints.
Perhaps intentionally, the last five stories are the most moving. Secondary characters play strong roles, even though the main character's vision remains central, and there is a strong, believable strain of earned optimism.
Wolff has said that he can never predict what his next projects will be; they come unbidden. In The Night in Question he has been visited again and again, it seems, by the genie of strong loners determined to make a small part of the wide world their peculiar own. But this stance, which might seem repetitious, is in this writer's hands surprisingly various, for the obsessives here can fix equally upon guilt or vengeance, loneliness or loyalty, love or religion. Indeed, this collection of many tiny worlds becomes a distinctive fictional universe.
Charles Flowers, who lives in Purdy's, NY, received the NY Press Association's Best Column Award for his criticism.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.