Tobias Wolff is one of a handful of American short story masters. He’s one of those guys that gets people into writing to begin with. I’ve had conversations with friends not only about his stories, but about the first time we read those stories. In the same way people can remember the first time they heard, say, the Replacements, I can remember the first time I read “The Night in Question” and “Bullet to the Brain.” Recollections of those reading experiences feel the same as the first time I read Carver or Lewis Hyde or any of a number of other people.

And certainly a collected work of Wolff’s makes a ton of sense. I’m actually a little surprised that this isn’t being put out by the Everyman’s Library branch of Knopf. Their treatment of Munro and Didion seem, to me, a good example to follow with someone like Wolff. Having a great selection of his stories, from Garden of North American Martyrs to Back in the World to Night In Question, is about as vital a book in any library as I can imagine.

And the old stories—touched up, the author admits in a quick note at the front of the book (though his retouching skills are at least as adroit as original-touching skills: I, at least, never even noticed what might’ve been changed)—hold up wonderfully. It’s tempting to go into rapturous detail of just about any of the earlier stories, but a better yardstick might be to look at the copyright page in each of the three earlier collections: count the number of stories recognized either as Best American Short Stories or as O’Henry winners. I’m not at all saying that every book that receives a prize is great, but it’d be hard to argue against someone winning a prize almost every year, over and over like a clock.

The hard part of this new book is the new stories, ones that’ve come out in the twelve years since The Night In Question. This is not, at all, a bitter review of a writer who once was a master and has somehow lost his old, sure touch. I’d still buy anything Wolff puts out; I’d still buy anything the day it comes out. He still is a master and his old, sure touch is still very much present.

What’s changed, though, is the emotional heft of the stories. The ten new stories are all about older people, about parents facing difficult circumstances regarding children—either their own (as in “Nightingale”) or others’ (as in “White Bible”). In “Down to the Bone,” the main character confronts issues of fidelity and Freud as he makes arrangements for his mother’s imminent cremation. In maybe the most frustrating story in the collection, a man walking his dead wife’s dog has a conversation with the dog about the woman. There’s more to “Her Dog” than that, of course, but still: it’s a hard story to swallow.

When this book came out at the start of March, Slate had a piece declaring Wolff’s key skill was a mastery, in his work, of deception, of lies, and the charge makes some degree of sense. Most of his stories feature some aspect of duplicity, either an outright lie one character tells another, or a lie a character tells him- or herself. What Slate didn’t seem to comment on, though, was that Wolff’s skillset leaves him almost heroically suited to write beautifully about youth, about the time in life when, because of age and agency, characters have a different relationship to truth and lies than they do when they’re older.

Look at the true-blue, absolute classics: “Bullet to the Brain,” maybe Wolff’s most cited (at least among authors I know) story, ends with the character’s dying thought focusing on a youthful moment on a baseball field. “The Night In Question,” maybe my favorite story by Wolff, ends with a sister’s recollection of her and her brother’s fear of and bravery against an abusive dad. Not for nothing, Wolff’s written two memoirs—one about growing up, one about being young in Vietnam—and the only novel he acknowledges, Old School, centers around a prep school and the young students therein.

Is some aspect of this just that I prefer stories of youth because I understand them? Perhaps. I have an easier time imagining, for instance, a boy painting a fence bright red because of frustrations about his friend’s girl, than I do imagining a guy talking to his dead wife’s dog. I’m not yet thirty: perhaps these things come. Still, it seems remarkable to note that Wolff’s skill—his ability to paint a character or a scene with shockingly telling details, his beautiful sentences, the sense of warm humanity that moves through all his stories—is certainly evident in the new stories, but that skill absolutely shines like a Brasso’d lamp in the earlier, youth-centered stuff.

(And I know, yes: there are earlier stories in which adults are major characters. Still: think of the story “Mortals,” in which a man calls in his own obituary. First, the protagonist of that story is young, though almost more important, the man’s act—falsifying his own death for some attention—seems almost comically young, at least emotionally (and yes, I know: adults rarely have emotional lives much more developed than those of children. But still.))

 

It seems dumb to mention this, though it’s likely just as dumb not to mention it: look at the cover of Our Story Begins. Older guy, in black and white, staring at the camera with a look that’s not necessarily a smile but could become one soon, sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms. Look at the (paperback, at least) cover of Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: older guy (though not as old as Wolff is: Carver died aged 50; Wolff is 62), black and white, staring at the camera with a look of either menace or concentration (and if you look long enough, maybe a sly smile buried deep).

Again, yes: Perhaps Lorraine Louie (the woman who designed the cover of Where I’m Calling From) and Carol Devine Carson (the woman who designed the cover of Our Story Begins) should be the artists under consideration here. I’ll go out on a limb, though, and presume that both Carver and Wolff had more than a little bit of input into what their books looked like.

I’m bringing all this up not just because Wolff and Carver were friends and colleagues at Syracuse and beyond, and not just because they’re two of the handful of short story authors whose rise marked, in the 80’s, the supposed renaissance of the short story; the new stories in each of these collections—Carver’s last stories ever, Wolff’s most recent stories—seem, to me anyway, to be worth looking at both closely and together.

Carver’s final stories—”Errand,” “Blackbird Pie,” “Intimacy,” “Menudo,”—are focused on men looking into their pasts, seeing their mistakes, and recognizing the impossibility of fixing anything. This was, we all know, Carver’s terrain: the fractured marriages, the infidelities, the petty, tiny mistakes and problems that plague adults. But in his final stories there’s an air of resignation; characters seem to give up and let go and realize things may not be good but will have to be good enough. By no stretch does that mean the characters are happy with the outcomes of their fixes, but look at the unbelievably sad and amazing end of “Blackbird Pie”:

“It could be said, for instance, that to take a wife is to take a history. And if that’s so, then I understand that I’m outside history now—like horses and god. Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me—unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendos. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying good-bye to history. Good-bye, my darling.”

 

No matter how devastated the guy may be, his last moment isn’t one of rage against history leaving him: he says goodbye. He makes his peace. And history moves past.

I don’t know enough about Carver to know how many of the late stories were written when he knew he was going to die very young. It seems hard not to graft some of Carver’s identity onto the stories, though, and his characters’ drive to find some peaceful way to say goodbye to their pasts, their lives, their loves, speaks, at least a little (I’d guess) to his own drive for the same.

 

Wolff, thankfully, is not (as far as I know) sick and has not been told he’s about to die—it’s there in the title, right? Our Story Begins? His characters haven’t the luxury of knowing their own fates and so they struggle, looking for the best way they can find to act without knowing that the word “best” carries a different weight when it’s coupled with the word “last.”

Wolff’s new stories feature characters somewhat adrift, trying to make their way back to some prior, un-fucked-up moment, though even that level of clarity is not quite fair. The father in “Nightingale,” driving his son to a military school that will, the father hopes, discipline the lazy, jobless, reading-on-the-couch son he’s raised. The trick, of course, is that the father’s given the son exactly the life the father himself didn’t have, since he had to get up before dawn to deliver newspapers. The adult son in “Down to the Bone,” returns, in the last scene, to his mother’s assisted living community and allows her to mistake him for her own father. In “Deep Kiss,” a man, visiting his aging mother, finds out the woman he first loved has died (and, through her death, has left him fundamentally alone in ways he hadn’t yet been, as he’d spent some part of his own imagination, throughout his life, thinking of her, living a double life in his head with her).

One of the strongest aspects of Wolff’s work has always been incredibly strong endings. We’re left with characters in moments that feel both ferociously charged and inevitable. But these new stories’ endings feel…softer, maybe. For sure more quiet. The final moments feel not intense but subdued and washed out.

Perhaps its unfair to even look at these books together. For their friendship and situational similarities—together at Syracuse, published in several of the same magazines, mentioned how often in the same breath re: the new wave of American short stories—Carver and Wolff are absolutely different writers. And maybe Carver’s terrible gift of knowledge of his own fate casts a shadow on the later stories he wrote, both on the characters in the story and on the way we approach the stories (reread “Intimacy” if you’d like, and wonder whether or not the story would have the same propulsion if you didn’t know that Carver knew he’d die young, if you didn’t know Carver had a former wife (with whom he’d had two kids)—if you didn’t know, basically, that the story might be highly autobiographical).

Whoever else Wolff might be looking out at—with a calm, welcoming face, with a face that would be hard to see as frustrated or mean or in any way negative at all—from the cover of his new collection of stories, it seems at least a little possible that he’s looking out at Carver, at that old picture of an old friend.