Boys don't cry
Who is Tobias Wolff? Is he the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie This Boy’s Life, a young kid raised by a single mom and an abusive stepfather (played with memorable menace by Robert De Niro) in early-‘70s Seattle? Is he the Vietnam soldier who tries to get himself assigned increasingly dangerous missions by baiting his commanding officer with sarcasm (in the short story “Casualty”)? Is he the newspaper obituary editor (in “Mortals”) who gets fired when the man whose death notice he mistakenly printed up walks into his newsroom to take offense? Is he the kid who, trying to compete with a boyhood pal for the attentions of the new young girl in the neighborhood, paints a neighbor’s house and picket fence firetruck red (in “Two Boys and a Girl”)?
Wolff is a classic short story writer who’s lived all these worlds, on the page, some of them in real life. He did serve in Vietnam, he was a newspaper editor for a spell, and he definitely wrote a memoir called This Boy’s Life about his coming of age in Seattle.
The first story of his that really caught my attention, though, was “Bullet in the Brain” (originally contained in the collection A Night in Question which I picked up at Powerbooks, and the new omnibus, Our Story Begins). It’s part David Fincher, without the gore; part American Beauty, without the schmaltz. In it, an acerbic book critic (“known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed”) is standing on line in a bank. A robbery commences. The nylon-stockinged robber, brandishing a pistol, tells everyone to shut up or they’re dead. The critic can’t help smirking to himself at the robber’s diction, especially the barked-out command, “Capiche?”
Anders burst out laughing, He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche, oh, God, capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.
It doesn’t end there, however. Wolff explains that, in the microseconds before the bullet travels through Anders’ brain and buries itself in his thalamus, he remembers a key moment of his life, but it is worth noting the things he did not remember first: not his first lover, nor his ex-wife, nor his professors, not even the poems he memorized as a youth to “give himself the shivers at will.” He did not remember seeing a women leap to her death from an adjacent building one day, or being kicked in the ribs by a cop during an anti-war rally. “He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.”
Instead, this unhappy critic remembers a country field, playing baseball with a friend and his friend’s cousin, who has traveled up from Mississippi. The two boys ask the cousin which position he likes to play best. “Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.”
Anders is “strangely aroused by those two final words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.” They is, they is, they is.
I always thought the story would make a good Fincher film, with intricate detailed shots of the bullet working its way through the brain (in fact, someone named David Van Ancken did film the story; haven’t seen it) as Anders recounts his life, and all the universe compresses into those two words: “They is.”
It’s Wolff’s gift to combine a contemporary sensibility with classical short story form. Fathers and sons — especially sons running wild — play a big part in his fictional world. Plus he’s such a master at everyday, blue-collar dialogue, the sort of poetry Raymond Carver or Richard Ford could muster on a good day. His stories are built to last, the best ones, and many are contained in Our Story Begins (plus 10 new ones that contain fresh marvels). “Bullet in the Brain” may be the one you read first, the Tarantino-esque attention-grabber, but it really just lures you into Wolff’s other tiny wonders. A story like “Mortals” is ostensibly about a careless editor who is called into the boss’s office because he ran an obituary without checking to see if the person was, in fact, dead. But the details Wolff deploys — like a skilled field tactician — whisper so much more. It turns out the guy’s been running obits for months without checking to see if people are really dead or not.
The truth was, I never followed those procedures. People were dying all the time. I hadn’t seen the point in asking their families if they were really dead, or calling the funeral parlors back to make sure the funeral parlors had just called me. All this procedural stuff was a waste of time, I’d decided; it didn’t seem possible that anyone could amuse himself by concocting phony death notices and impersonating undertakers. Now I saw that this was foolish of me, and showed a radical failure of appreciation for the varieties of human pleasure.
Of course, the obit writer is fired for his “Bartleby” moment. Then the story gets weirder: the man he inadvertently “killed off,” Mr. Givens, invites him to lunch. They discuss who could have phoned in the phony obit and why, and what makes for an interesting obituary. Our fired obit writer guesses that Givens phoned in his own death notice, just to get noticed, and hectors him down the street, trying to get him to admit as much. He does, then our narrator heads back to the restaurant, trying to avoid eye contact with a street mime on the sidewalk who captures — to a tee — the motions of a passing businessman in a three-piece suit, his “leading man’s assurance, the supercilious tilt of his chin.” (“I slipped him a quarter, hoping he’d let me pass.”)
Behind all the noir-isms decorating “Mortals,” you get a sense of a man who has given up on the never-ending gush of life, like a BP pipeline broken loose. Like Bartleby in Melville’s short story, he would “prefer not to.” All he wants to do with his life, now, at this moment, is to sidestep a mime, someone who can’t even speak a word about him. It’s sad, and funny, and pure Wolff.
