I completely failed to keep up with short-story month, or the adventures of Our Hero as of late, but I had a reasonable excuse. I moved into a new apartment. It’s taken until now to get settled. I’m all settled now and plan to resume a regular posting schedule shortly.
I just finished reading Tobias Wolff’s collection of selected stories, Our Story Begins. A Couple of the new stories were a little dull, but over all I enjoyed the collection.
I discovered Wolff a year ago when I started planning my 201 course. The anthology I selected included “The Rich Brother” in it’s chapter on character. Later on, I was flipping through another anthology and found “Bullet in the Brain.” Then ending of both stories stuck with me. I’m still working out exactly what I liked about the endings so much. I think it is because with both stories, I could see the next scene. In the case of “The Rich Brother,” I could see the future relationship of the two brothers almost as clearly as I could see their brief car trip home. With “Bullet in the Brain,” I could take the brief outline of Anders’s life that Wolff provides and flush it out enough to see exactly how two words “they is” lead to the character’s death decades later.
As I read through Our Story Begins, I found stories with more powerful endings than those of the “Bullet in the Brain” and “The Rich Brother.” The last sentence of “Flyboys” made me go back through the story a second time in order to find a subtle subplot that I had missed. After I finished “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” “Soldier’s Joy,” and “The Chain,” I had to put the book down and let the ending resonate (I had the same experience the first time I read Carver’s, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”). The endings of these stories were so good, that I’m half tempted to read to collection over again (and I would, if my to read shelf wasn’t actually three shelves).
For those of you who now want to read a Wolff story, I found “Hunters in the Snow” online. I’m sure there’s more out there.