Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Navtej Kohli gives another review of a very light and well written book by Wolff. In this new collection, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff is more often than not begin by catching people in what seem to be mundane, routine positions. The start of the stories begins with the story "My friend Clark and I had decided to build a jet plane,". "They were doing the dishes, his wife washing as he dried," begins another. "On her thirtieth birthday, Ted threw a surprise party for Helen." In openings that deftly infer an ordinary world around them, Wolff’s lights come up on familiar people, in familiar places: They live in small towns on the West Coast. They are stuck driving somewhere they do not want to go. They are doing cocaine for a friend’s birthday. They are going hunting. They are building an airplane with a new friend but stop to visit an old one. They are driving cross-country to try to start a new life. It is Wolff’s gift to enter these worlds in a plainspoken way, one that seems matter of fact, but nonetheless determines a great deal quickly.

Take the sentences with which Wolff’s entire collection launches: "When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught. She shared his views but did not sign the petition. She was, after all, on trial herself -- as a teacher, as a woman, as an interpreter of history."

The next story, "Hunters in the Snow," plays with the forces that imbue a similar constellation -- fear, power, loyalty, being trapped -- in the relationship among three friends out deer hunting.

It is the everyday quality of the ingredients and recipes that makes these stories great. Each tale is delivered in spare, precise prose, and many return us to the spectacle of small slights, subtle cruelties -- that in turn lead one character to hurt herself or another to abandon someone he once said he would love. It is a very good bedtime read story.