Back in the world: stories

Wolff (PEN/Faulkner winner for The Barracks Thief offers tales in the classic mode, maintaining unity of time, place and action. His characters and their dilemmas become recognizable in a few pages. ``The voice is crisp, the words are simple, the talk is laconic and everyday, but the questions these 10 stories pose are terrifying ones about good and evil,'' PW found. (October) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Readers of Wolff's first short-story vol ume, In the Garden of the North Ameri can Martyrs , and his recent, award- winning The Barracks Thief will not be disappointed by this new collection. Wolff retains his mastery for using one telling incident to epitomize the com plexities of ordinary life. His charac tersa failed priest, a teenager, a cyni cal soldierhave been cut off from the realities of life until a seemingly random event returns them to the flow of life, ``back in the world.'' As before, Wolff's terse melodramas of ordinary and unhappy lives inhabit a universe that is unremittingly bleak; even minor triumphs and good deeds are absorbed into its nothingness without a trace. A brilliant examination of life for those who can stand its grimness. Highly rec ommended. Shelley Cox, Southern Il linois Univ. Lib., Carbondale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This second collection of Wolff's stories (In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, 1981, was the first) continues to show an enormous technical sophistication--and a blurring, chameleon-ish tendency. Wolff is right up there in practicing an impressive variety of modernist narrative techniques. . .post-Modernist, even: he's supple enough to go back without apology, as he does in ""Our Story Begins"" and ""The Rich Brother"" to the still sturdy if old-fashioned device of someone telling a story to someone else in the story the reader reads. He's an homage-payer, too: there's a priest-story with (at least at the start) a fine J.F. Powers comic feel to it; in ""Say Yes,"" a husband and wife have a kitchen discussion that blends Carver and Cheerer both. Wolff's own distinct voice is hard to find, though. It seems dark, that much you can say: vaguely post-Beat (""Desert Breakdown,"" 1968) or mosaic-violent (""Soldier's Joy""). Yet there are two stories here that seem entirely Wolff's own--and are very striking: ""Leviathan""--a viciously banal two-couple West Coast cocaine party; and (best of all) ""The Poor Are Always With Us""--an utterly odd story about a young Silicon Valley type who finds himself winning three cars on three utterly irrational bets with an unstable stranger. It's a story of ethics without a destination or a definition--and has touches of real and frightening anarchy beneath the adventitiousness. Wolff, in these, seems less like a high-tech narrative-maker, able to reproduce any style and any subject-matter; and while he doesn't exactly seem to have the grounded unease of someone like Andre Dubus, the voice of some kind of moralist is pushing forth here. A mostly too glib yet still promising display by a writer of evident talent and unsure direction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Readers of Wolff's first short-story vol ume, In the Garden of the North Ameri can Martyrs , and his recent, award- winning The Barracks Thief will not be disappointed by this new collection. Wolff retains his mastery for using one telling incident to epitomize the com plexities of ordinary life. His charac tersa failed priest, a teenager, a cyni cal soldierhave been cut off from the realities of life until a seemingly random event returns them to the flow of life, ``back in the world.'' As before, Wolff's terse melodramas of ordinary and unhappy lives inhabit a universe that is unremittingly bleak; even minor triumphs and good deeds are absorbed into its nothingness without a trace. A brilliant examination of life for those who can stand its grimness. Highly rec ommended. Shelley Cox, Southern Il linois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1985 Cahners Business Information.