She remembered it all - the tremor in her legs, the hammering pulse in her neck as the smell of smoke grew stronger.
In the story that gives this 1996 book its title, Frances remembers the childhood she shared with her brother Frank.įrank Senior worked himself into a rage below, muttering, slamming doors, stinking up the house with the cigars he puffed when he was on a tear. In “The Other Miller,” a teenage soldier lies (or thinks he does) to get out of maneuvers in the mud and rain. In “Two Boys and a Girl,” one of the boys pretends to own the Buick he drives around town, and later he lies to get revenge. Similarly, almost all of the stories deal in some way with lies and lying, and also with fear. Count on it.”Ĭhildren and teens are the central characters in the majority of Wolff’s stories, and make an appearance of one sort or another in most of the rest.
Or the conclusion of “Chain,” when the reader knows more than the guy trying to provide comfort: He’d keep saying her name…Say it in the moony broguish way she liked…He would hit that note, and once he got her listening there was no telling what might happen, because all he really needed were words, and of words, Wiley knew, there was no end. Here, for instance, is how “The Life of the Body” ends: Many have endings that don’t really end, but open a new door through which the reader can get a glimpse of what is coming next. Someday she was going to take passage on one of those ships, by herself or maybe with some friends…When she closed her eyes she could see the whole thing, perfectly Through the crazed Plexiglas she could make out some small islands and the white glint of a ship in the apex of its wake. The sky was clear, no clouds between her and the sea below, whole name she loved to hear the pilots say - the East China Sea. A nurse on a C141 med evac has trouble coping when she realizes the soldier she has been caring for is dead.ĭuring a lull later on she stopped and leaned her forehead against a porthole.
Some have stutter-step endings that seem to go one way and then another and maybe a third, such as in “Casualty.” An American soldier in Vietnam is fatally wounded. The 15 stories in The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff don’t fit that at all. A friend of mine is very big on stories having a beginning, a middle and an end.
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