to Christmas dinner from an ill-advised ski trip will be kept only at the price of terrible risks, since he insists on remaining in the mountains until a fresh snowstorm has closed the roads. The son knows his parents’ marriage and his own life hang in the balance as they avoid a police roadblock to descend the mountain. Instead of foresight, the father possesses reckless skill as a driver, a genius at following the invisible road beneath the powder snow. There is no fatal mishap, but beyond the seemingly happy ending lies an inevitable confrontation with the state police and eventual family tragedy. The son, who must identify with both parents, since he recognizes elements of both in himself, can eventually accept the family breakup for the sake of a peak experience with his father.

“Flyboys” presents a complex interweaving of friendship and loyalty among three boys and their families. The first-person narrator, speaking from some future vantage point, reminisces about planning to build a jet with Clark, a boy from a wealthy, “lucky” family. The narrator eagerly spends his time in Clark’s comfortable home, a contrast to his own, where his parents are fighting out the last acts of a dying marriage. He offers his imagination and ideas, Clark develops them into precisely drawn blueprints. When a third boy, Freddy, offers them a real jet canopy, part of his dead father’s legacy, the idea suddenly acquires physical possibility.

As the boys meet at Freddy’s home, the narrator reflects on the history of their friendship. Over a long period of time, he sought out Freddy and his family for the mutual comfort apparent in the effortless teasing and word games they play together. Freddy’s family is cursed by horrible bad luck. Not only has Freddy’s father died, but a charismatic older brother has been killed in a motorcycle accident and Freddy has recently nearly died from asthma. His mother is crippled by her grief. The narrator, like Freddy’s amiable good-for-nothing stepfather Ivan, had temporarily abandoned the family in their unhappiness, stopping his visits and avoiding Freddy at school. Clark’s home and the jet plans had replaced Freddy. Now the narrator measures his guilt against his compatibility with Freddy, the family’s chronic unhappiness with their generous affection.

The weight of the bad luck of Freddy’s family is presented in the dead brother’s truck, laden with cheap firewood Ivan has ripped from what had been a beautiful forest. Ivan has managed to mire the truck deep in mud. The three boys pit their wits and muscles to the task and temporarily rescue Ivan’s project, but all three are physically drained and covered with mud. The asthmatic Freddy barely survives the battle. The minimal value of the wood has not been weighed against the devastation of the forest and the family’s physical resources.

When Clark asks the narrator to accept Freddy as a partner in the jet project, the narrator rejects him, ostensibly because the jet will only hold two people. On a deeper level, he fears linking himself with Freddy’s chronic misfortune, an illness as obvious as asthma. The narrator’s betrayal of his friend acknowledges that Freddy has no future. The jet, too, beyond the elaborate plans, had no future. The dream of escape and exaltation shared by the three friends was as ephemeral as their friendship. Their families are doomed to dissolve, through death or estrangement. Even the “lucky” Clark, proves to be haunted by family unhappiness, hidden under a perfect veneer. He hesitates to return home, dreading his mother’s mood and is only able to relax when he hears the music she is playing when he returns and realizes she is happy. In the bleak world of “Flyboys,” there is no absolute trust, and plans for the future are doomed to fail.

In the collection’s title story, an older sister, Frances, takes the role of defender for her younger brother Frank Junior against their father’s psychological and physical abuse. The dominance of the father is shown in the equivalent names of the characters; both children are named for him. As Frances reviews her memories, she accuses her mother and herself for not intervening in the crucial moments when a life pattern was set, before her father became confirmed in his role as tormentor of his child. The mother who should have defended the children is guilty of a double betrayal, first for her passivity in the face of the father’s growing violence, then for her sudden death. Frances’ later attempts to defend the younger child exhilarated her but left them both beaten and bloody. Although their father has died and Frances and Frank are adults at the time of the story, they have carried their history with them.

Frances listens unwillingly as Frank repeats a sermon, a “true life” parallel for Christ’s crucifixion, built on a father’s terrible decision, to doom his beloved son in order to rescue a trainload of strangers. Frances rejects the choice of the many over the defenseless child, knowing she must always choose and defend Frank. Her loyalty is not blind to Frank’s weakness, but based upon it. This loyalty comes before her own marriage and work and continues in spite of Frank’s irresponsible and occasionally dangerous behavior. In the end, she pushes Frank also to reject the “Sunday school answer,” to imagine that she is the terrified child whose trusted brother must choose the many or the one. As she has chosen him, she wants him to think through to the same choice, in spite of the terrifying power of God the Father.

Most of the stories keep a slightly detached tone. They wind toward a perfect ironic ending, then deflect into a territory of ambiguities and ambivalence. Set in the gritty world of an American camp in Vietnam, “Casualty” presents Biddy (Benjamin Delano Sears, also known as “B.D.”) as he struggles with the complexities of his friendship and loyalty for Ryan, a wise guy whose “lip” initially alienated the prissy Biddy but eventually won his affection. They have served together so long that Biddy feels compelled to defend and protect Ryan, as they both approach their last days in service in Vietnam. His loyalty to his friends is one of the few things about himself that Biddy recognizes from before Vietnam.

The hazards of war throw together officers who, for reasons independent of their true character and worth, either seem lucky and are loved by their men or lose the men’s respect and thus endanger them. The arrival of a new sergeant, who ignores the unwritten rules of the platoon and raises an uncontrollable spirit of opposition in Ryan, puts both friends in danger. Ryan feels driven to offend the new officer at every turn. As he goads the sergeant, Ryan is himself goaded to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Driven by loyalty for his friend, Biddy even contemplates murdering their commander. When Ryan is terribly wounded, Biddy is released from his imagined responsibility and must deal with the guilt for his feeling of relief, a feeling he rejects almost before he recognizes it. The third-person narrator follows the subtlety of Biddy’s thought into his later life, into his uneasy reminiscences with the woman he will eventually marry, revealing the protective rationalizations that keep Biddy from fully understanding his emotions. Who is the real casualty—Biddy, Ryan, or the overburdened nurse who accompanies the dying boy in his last journey?

Not all the stories Wolff presents in The Night in Question are interwoven so elaborately with conflicting feelings and ambiguity. The collection’s first story, “Mortals,” in which a bored newspaper writer is fired for neglecting to check back on an obituary written for a man who proves to be alive, is a compact bundle of paradox, as the narrator and reader together come to the solution of its central puzzle. In the fittingly titled “Chain,” a series of decisions driven by strong emotion and family loyalty relentlessly compel a good man to responsibility for the violent murder of a young boy he has never met. The progression of coincidence and interlocking characters produces a tightly knit plot worthy of O. Henry. Not all of the stories are bleak, either. Some are marked with sly humor, as is “Two Boys and a Girl,” where the progression of a summer dalliance between a young man and his best friend’s girl leads, inevitably, to painting a white picket fence bright red. Without going so far as to say there is something for everyone here, there is certainly a fair variety of well-made stories, with a depth of perception, effective background, interesting characters, and overall a concern for the values of human loyalty in the face of human frailty.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCII, August, 1996, p. 1857.

Boston Globe. October 6, 1996, p. N15.

Denver Post. October 13, 1996, p. G11.

The Guardian. November 20, 1996, II, p. 4.

Library Journal. CXXI, September 1, 1996, p. 213.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 13, 1996, p. 2.

The New York Times Book Review. CI, November 3, 1996, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, August 5, 1996, p. 428.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 24, 1996, p. C5.

San Francisco Chronicle. October 13, 1996, p. REV3.

Most of Tobias Wolff's stories do not depend on a detailed description of a particular location for their effectiveness. Wolff tends to provide some general suggestions which place the story within a recognizable region, but beyond the necessity for sufficient detail to support the realistic mode which Wolff employs, the stories are not anchored to their settings. In one of the most powerful stories in the collection, "Firelight," a woman and her teenage son are searching for an apartment in an unnamed city. Eventually, the boy mentions that they have been in Seattle for several years, but the story does not require any knowledge of the demography or geography of that city. References to Husky Stadium indicate that it is the University of Washington whose campus they pass through, but any large university would be equally appropriate when they look at an apartment that belongs to an idealistic and disappointed professor. When the story shifts toward the more recent present at its conclusion, the reflective narrator could be in any state where "the winters are long and cold." The effect of Wolff's utilization of a generalized locale is to give the story a kind of inclusiveness, a more universalized applicability that makes it relevant to human experience beyond ethnicity or narrow cultural definitions.

Similarly, the title story of the collection might have occurred in any of the middle decades of the twentieth century, in any part of the United States, although even these very broad marking points are not demonstrable, so the reader must determine the setting by styles of speech and attitudes. It is as if Wolff is more interested in the psychology of the characters, the inner landscape of their lives, than in where an event or incident has happened. When a story depends on a familiar historical situation, as in "Casualty" which takes place in Vietnam during the war, Wolff does not fill the narrative with an evocation of the climate or terrain, but almost casually builds a feeling of authenticity by references to "cold C-rats," new guys "sandbagging the interior walls of a bunker," the company moving "silently through the perimeter weaving a loopy path between mines and trip flares," and a generic description of "the chugging of generators, crumple and thud of distant artillery, the uproarious din of insects." Toward the conclusion of the story, the range of action widens and becomes more specific as Wolff follows a wounded soldier from Qui Nhon to Yokota to Zama in a helicopter crossing the East China Sea. The impression that remains is of a series of actions not uncommon for soldiers serving in the war which took place in a part of the world unfamiliar to most Americans.

Other stories offer a few pertinent details which tend to ground them in a mid-twentieth- century sensibility. "Mortals" places its protagonist in "Tad's Steakhouse over by the cable car turnaround" where he had seen "Richard Brautigan, the writer" on occasion. That might be sufficient to indicate that the setting is San Francisco, but it could just as well be any urban locale where "you could get a six-ounce sirloin, salad, and baked potato for a buck twenty-nine" since "This was 1974." "Powder" could be located anywhere in the United States where there are ski slopes, the reference to a "Mount Baker" suggesting an English inheritance but little else. The evocation of the mountainous terrain and the snow is crucial—"A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for awhile and then tilted sharply downward"—since the protagonist, a teenage boy joining his father for an exciting outing, is energized and awed by the natural world in winter. The particular mountain range where this takes place is not important, nor is the exact date, although the father's automobile, an Austin- Healey sports car, was an uncommon and exotic vehicle throughout its relatively brief existence in the United States. This selective brand identification is sufficient to indicate that the father is an unconventional, style conscious person, one of his most appealing and more problematical attributes, as the story reveals.

"Smorgasbord" has the most elaborately detailed setting in the collection. It begins in "a prep school in March," informs the reader almost immediately that the narrator plans to join the Peace Corps, and pinpoints the location when the narrator is invited to join a fellow student whose stepmother "is in New York for a fashion show" and has driven up to take her stepson and a few friends to dinner. The woman is wealthy, Hispanic, young and beautiful. A severe contrast in cultures is set up when one of the boys suggests they go to a smorgasbord—"Swenson's, or Hansen's, some such honest Swede of a name." The combination of a mundane, even plebeian establishment, the stylishly Latina woman, her sulking, spoiled stepson, and the slightly dazed and bemused narrator produces a series of incidents enveloped in comic confusion, which Wolff maintains by mixing Spanish words with basic English slang. When the story shifts away from the dinner and towards the sublimated desires of the narrator and one of his friends, the course of action that they choose to follow is inspired by the brief touch of the exotic and unusual that they have experienced. Even with the particular details that Wolff provides, however, the setting is not as important as the psychological structure of the characters, the inner landscape which is Wolff's most serious concern.

Since he does not have the novelist's space to gradually develop character, Wolff feels that it is very important for him to have a substantial understanding of what the characters' lives and histories are so that he will be able to present a consistent, convincing portrayal from the inception of the story. "I spend months on each story I write," Wolff states, "and through many, many drafts I discover who my characters are . . . I have to spend a lot of time with my characters, trying things out." One of the features of a character's personality which Wolff regards as important is his or her name. "When you name someone, that's a holy act," he says. "You call some essence into existence by the very name." The eponymous protagonist of "The Other Miller" might have been quite different if, as Wolff notes, he was called "Billy Lee," since "There are certain things that a Billy Lee is that a Miller isn't, and vice versa." Readers will bring their own associations to any name, but the Frank/Frances resonance illuminates their relationship; the character named Benjamin Delano Sears, or B. D., but called Biddy in "Casualty," has an entire history in his name transformation; the contrast between Crosley (British) and Garcia (Latino) and Hansen (Nordic) sets up immediate shifts in focus in "Smorgasbord," while the nameless narrator (with his nameless girlfriend) is more ambiguously interesting due to a lack of a defining label. Similarly, the young narrator and his mother are never named, while the important but secondary characters in "Firelight" are identified as Dr. and Mrs. Avery, and in the coda, the narrator mentions "my children" and "my wife" without saying their names. This is one of Wolff's methods for controlling the distance from the characters, utilizing direct, first-person-present narrations in many stories which bring the reader into close contact with the narrative consciousness of the protagonist, and then using various methods to suggest that there are depths, layers, facets, complexities and mysteries supporting and sustaining the vivid clarity of their voice in the story.

In discussing the form of the short story, Wolff contends that since a "story is so short it must be sustained by some quality in the language," and maintains that the action of a story "is interior; it's held together by the thoughts and perceptions of the main character." When utilizing a first person narration, Wolff establishes a singular style of expression immediately. The narrator in "Flyboys" is confident and assured when he declares, "My friend Clark and I decided to build a jet plane." The prep school student in "Smorgasbord" wants to sound worldly, dismissing a history master's attempt at wit by saying, "We were supposed to get the impression that when we weren't around he turned into someone interesting, someone witty and profound." The young man in "Firelight" reveals his anxiety when he admits that "My mother swore we'd never live in a boarding house again, but circumstances did not allow her to keep this promise." The son of estranged parents in "Powder" registers the stress he feels when he says about his father, "He'd had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him . . . . "

In those stories where the narration verges between an omniscient author's informative comments and the protagonist's responses to events, Wolff makes the character's reactions vivid and personal. In "Casualty," B. D. accepts the sergeant's estimate that he "didn't have what it took" since "he knew even better than Sergeant Holmes how scared he was." In "The Chain," Brian Gold rushes into action when a dog attacks his daughter: "Gold's mouth was next to the dog's ear. He said, 'Let go, damn you,' and then he took the ear between his teeth and bit down with everything he had." In "The Night in Question," Frank and Frances are engaged in an avid conversation from the onset. And in "Bullet in the Brain," where Wolff has created a particularly distasteful character, the action essentially unfolds within a physiological/psychological matrix that is the seat of thought for the man named Anders.

By integrating a character's responses to the environment with pointed descriptions of the milieu where an incident occurs, Wolff makes the region of action almost a component of the character. Passages of description are generally brief but vivid, augmenting the interior landscape of the characters. Wolff's approach is generally spare, with short bursts of lyric fire that heighten the pitch and tone of the passage. A plane carrying wounded men in Vietnam "spiraled upward until they gained the thin, cold, untroubled heights" ("Casualty"); a truck struggles to pull out of a mud hole, "it gathered speed on the track we'd made and hit the mud again and somehow slithered on, languidly, noisily, rear end sashaying, two great plumes of mud arcing off the back wheels" ("Flyboys"); the engine room of a drawbridge exudes ominous power, "Massive machinery. Gigantic screws turning everywhere, gears with teeth like file cabinets" ("The Night in Question"); rug merchants in Seattle "have to work like dogs, dragging them down from these tall teetering piles and then humping them over to you, sweating and gasping, staggering under the weight, their faces woolly with lint" ("Firelight"); the dim recollections of a childhood long past are remembered as "Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game." ("A Bullet in the Brain").

Wolff's evocative descriptive passages enhance his facility with the speech and thought of his characters, often expanding and solidifying the impression that has been initiated by their distinctive voices. In an affectionate tribute to Raymond Carver, one of Wolff's close friends as well as one of the most admired writers of short fiction in the twentieth century, Wolff praises Carver's work for giving "a new picture of America in a voice never heard before." Carver's stories, he continues, provide "the music found in ordinary speech," and the elements of Carver's stories that Wolff highlights—"their humanity and exactitude and elusive humor"—are prominent features of his work as well.

Aside from his memoir of the time he spent in the Special Forces in Vietnam, which one critic described as Wolff's record "of his sense of futility and growing disillusionment with the war," Wolff's writing does not focus on specific social issues. In accordance with his primary interest in the dimensions of a particular character, he tends to show how a person is affected by the demands of the world in which he or she lives. While operating from a definite moral base which becomes more apparent within the context of a group of stories, Wolff tends toward a sympathetic understanding of his character's deficiencies and is more intrigued than irritated by the failures of a social system. In discussing John Cheever, Wolff says "he was one of my masters" because of his "rejection of that easy cynicism that so many writers display as a sign of their sophistication." This is the key to "Bullet in the Brain" in which a hyper-educated intellectual cannot contain his contempt for the crude speech of bank robbers who are threatening his life. The exceptional power of the story derives from the second part of the narrative in which Wolff traces Anders's life back toward the unspoiled enthusiasm of youth, a tour-de force of illumination which casts Anders's fatal cynicism and incarcerating commitment to a complete ironic stance in contrast with its polar opposite in his earlier years.

Wolff is insistent that there is judgment in his work, but "that there's little condemnation." His experiences with his wayward parents may have given him an uncommon understanding of how a mixture of motives may lead a person toward behavior that is socially undesirable and personally repugnant without being evil. "I believe in the possibility of evil, and sometimes it appears in my work, but I wouldn't find it interesting to write completely evil people," he explains. Consequently, the one story touching on the war in Vietnam, "Casualty," is tinged with sorrow more than outrage. The almost pathetic semi-drunkard Wiley in "The Life of the Body" is seen with some sadness but he can regard his foolishness with a degree of comic absurdity that elevates his fumbling beyond self-contempt. The disheveled dwelling of the working-class family in "Flyboys" does not diminish their ingenuity and friendliness. The scheming of Miller in "The Other Miller" is delineated in such detail that his machinations, while obviously self-serving, do not seem entirely unreasonable. Two stories which deal with adolescent romance and unruly passion, "Smorgasbord" and "Two Boys and a Girl," recognize the uncertainty and occasional selfishness of their young protagonists without dismissing them as merely coarse or vulgar. All of the characters in "Firelight" have been disappointed by the world they inhabit, but Wolff's compassion for them extends beyond individuals to the society that is partially responsible for their unhappiness. This is a kind of social sensitivity that is more subtle and sometimes more penetrating than a direct attack on social ills, and it is in tune with Wolff's philosophical perspectives.

Wolff's autobiographical account, This Boy's Life: A Memoir, was filmed in 1994, with Robert DeNiro in the part of Dwight, his stepfather, Ellen Barkin as his mother (called Caroline here) and eighteen-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio as young Toby Wolff. The film was directed competently by Michael Caton-Jones, perhaps best known for Memphis Belle (1990), and very effectively photographed by David Watkins who won an Academy Award for Out of Africa (1985) and who beautifully contrasts the striking landscape of the Pacific Northwest with the bleak lives of the characters. DeNiro and DiCaprio deliver superb performances, and the screenplay by Robert Getchell (nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, 1974) is a sensitive adaptation of the book.

The film offers another angle of interpretation for some of the material that appears in stories in The Night in Question. DiCaprio's conception of the character drawn from Wolff's autobiographical recollections sheds some light on Wolff's delineation of the narrators in "Flyboys" and "Firelight." The character of Caroline is set in almost parallel paths to the mother in "Firelight." Frank and Frances in "The Night in Question" form a kind of partnership that is echoed by the relationship between Toby and Caroline in the film. The absence of Toby's father in the film establishes a kind of empty space that is something like the void or gap left by the missing male parent in "Smorgasbord" or "Firelight." The malignant figure of Frank senior in "The Night in Question" is reproduced in somewhat skewed form in DeNiro's unsettling presence in the film.

Conarroe, Joel. Review of This Boy's Life. New York Times Book Review (January 15, 1989): 1, 28. An incisive discussion of Wolff's life as the formulative basis for his memoir.
Eder, Richard. "The Boy Lost, The Writer Found." Los Angeles Times Book Review (January 8, 1989): 3, 6. A review of This Boy's Life.

Hannah, James. Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. A competent examination of Wolff's short fiction to the date of publication, with some biographical and bibliographical information.

Parini, Jay. "Interior Archeology." New York Times Book Review (November 3, 1996): 12. An interesting and informative review of The Night in Question.

Prose, Francine. "The Brothers Wolff." New York Times Magazine (February 5, 1989): 22-28. A biographical analysis of the writing of Wolff and his brother Geoffrey, who portrayed their father as The Duke of Deception (1980).

Ross, Jean W. "CA Interview with Tobias Wolff." In Contemporary Authors, vol. 117. Detroit: Gale, 1985. A candid, illuminating conversation.

Sienkewicz, Ann W. Review of "The Night in Question." In Magill's Literary Annual 1997. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1997. A thorough and intelligent review of the book.

Wolff, Tobias. "Raymond Carver Had His Cake and Ate It Too." Esquire (September, 1989) 240-248. A touching, eloquent tribute to Wolff's close friend, with many informative anecdotes that reveal some of Wolff's ideas and aspirations about his own writing.

RELATED WEBSITES
Schreiberg, David. "Interview: Tobias Wolff." www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ stanfordtoday/ed (December, 1996). A revealing discussion with Wolff concerning his writing, teaching and recent experiences.

Smith, Joan. "Spelunking the Unknown." http://www.salon.com (December, 1996). A wide-ranging interview with Wolff at the time of the publication of The Night in Question, covering his life, philosophy of composition and the meaning of the title for the collection.