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Published on 5/7/08
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“But you were a soldier. I can tell,” a Viennese woman says to a stranger in Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins, his dazzling new collection of old and new short fiction. Several stories are haunted by the ghosts of wars—past and present, at home and abroad. Wolff, who served in Vietnam, has a vision of human nature that is compassionate yet pitiless. TONY talks with the renowned author of Old School and This Boy’s Life.
Why are all of your characters so flawed?
Have you ever met anyone who wasn’t? Someone once asked the French painter Courbet why he didn’t paint more edifying things. Angels, for example, and simpering saints. And he said, “I don’t paint angels. I’ve never seen one.”
Raymond Carver once said that your stories are moral.
He went on to add that they are not cautionary tales. The point of my stories is certainly not to create sermons pretending to be stories.
Some of your fiction treats even everyday family relations as tragic. Why?
Our family lives are charged. Actually, War and Peace is more about families than it is about war, as is The Iliad and much of the Old Testament. It’s the biggest source of drama for us because it’s the one we live in.
The endings of these stories are unforgettable. Do you have a philosophy of endings?
When Hemingway was writing A Farewell to Arms, he revised the ending 39 times. I don’t think I’ve rewritten the ending of anything 39 times, but I’ve come pretty close. You keep trying until you get something that not only your mind but your whole body somehow assents to and says, “Yeah, that’s it.”
—Lisa Dierbeck
Our Story Begins (Knopf, $26.95) is out now. Wolff reads on Apr 8 at Barnes and Noble 82nd Street and on Apr 9, 2008, at 192 Books.
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