What makes a great short story? What makes a great novel? And, as has been asked so many times, which is the higher art - the short story, or the novel? Instinct suggests the short story.
Who knows? Why are some writers better at one form than the other? Does the true test of greatness rest in saying most in fewer words? The great short story writer knows the value of each word; the lesser novelist tends to hide behind language.
Critics have often argued that it is far more difficult to create the perfect story, although it can - and has - been done: look to Chekhov, Cheever, William Trevor, John McGahern, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff rather than the perfect novel, possibly because no one really expects perfection in a novel. Within many an average novel lies, I like to think, the lost seed of a potentially great short story.
There have always been writers at ease in both the novel and the short story; Updike and Trevor are good examples, but it appears that achieving genius in both is rare - sprinters don't make milers. Remarks concerning the short story invariably look to the Irish, for whom the novel continues to be an interesting sideshow. Ireland has a strong traditional claim to mastery of the short story, the territory in which the finest Irish storytelling resides.
But US fiction, for all its regional diversity and oppressive quest for that elusive Great American Novel mighty enough to express, as Thomas Wolfe once envisaged, the essence of his sprawling nation, has a greater claim. The short story belongs to America. US writers have created a treasure trove called the American short story, and well-established among the very finest of the best practitioners is Tobias Wolff, a master of the uneasy; the small shifts - a lie, a gesture, a choice - that define a life.
Born in 1945, Wolff belongs to the Vietnam generation and has, since the 1970s, written tough, outstanding stories. Fiction simply does not come much better than his novella, The Barracks Thief (1984). The Night in Question (1996) is one of the most superb collections a reader is likely to encounter. But then, the same applies to his other collections, Hunters in the Snow (1982) and Back in the World (1985). His stories compound the achievement of the post-second World War American short story.
As a writer, he looks to story and to life, particularly his own, and has written two inspired memoirs: This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army: Memoirs of the Lost War (1994). Although the war and his experiences have featured in his work - In Pharaoh's Army is an account of his year in Vietnam (My Tho on the Mekong Delta) - he is not a Vietnam writer. Central to his fiction is his obsession with the ways in which people create themselves. He is also an investigator of the moral essence of our actions. There is a poise and a relentlessness. Truth and its many forms of damage intrigue him. War for him is just another form of human conflict, the most major of which fester within ourselves.
A Wolff character is usually engaged in a search for identity. The narrator of much of Old School, an ambitious, clearly ruthless teenage boy determined to be a writer, is obsessed with such a quest. For him, the persona of the writer will more than compensate for the unexciting realities of his life as a widower's son who spends his vacations with sympathetic relatives.
No attempts are made to win the reader to his cause, the act of refining an existence he describes as "a performance". The narrative is set in the past, 1960, and in a lost world, that of the snobbish private school breathing the air of Kennedy glamour. It is an institution steeped in artifice, a clearly "somewhere back East" Ivy League-type school possessed of sufficient rituals, pseudo-Anglo pretensions and snobbery to leave any guy, particularly a scholarship boy, scarred for life. It is also an academy of privilege in which for all its pride in its sportsmen, the true heroes are the writers, "the scribblers".
It is among these would-be literary men that the narrator attempts to swagger. This is a school in which the English teachers inhabit a higher plane, soaring above the math and science staff. Affectation is something to be cultivated. The narrator is too worldly, too shrewd, his judgements too exact. His older self, looking back on his younger self, imposes that older self on a narrative that seldom evokes a sense of story.
This is a school in which one teacher, Dean Makepeace, is revered because, as school lore holds, he knew Hemingway. It is also a school in which competition and rivalry is reduced to striving to win an audience with visiting famous writers. Each term the final year boys battle to win a contest; the object of the contest is the writing of a story that will win the praise of whatever famous writer happens to be on offer.
Contest here is not the same as test. The competitiveness generated by the contest, the chance of meeting a famous writer, creates ill will instead of great writing among the boys . Old School is Wolff's first book since The Night in Question; it is also his first novel. Both facts are exciting. Wolff is one of the finest living storytellers, so good his direct, weighted sentences contain hard truths. But this book is oddly evasive; reading it develops into a parallel search, a search for Wolff's familiar, deceptively effortless artistry in a narrative that hovers between being a ten-chapter sequence of thematically-linked stories and an oblique memoir, but never the novel it is intended to be.
Much of the unease lies in the references to Hemingway, the clichéd, macho ridiculousness as well as the unavoidable literary legacy. Having seen a lesser student scoop the prize of an audience with Robert Frost, portrayed here as ever the ambivalent old codger, the narrator is determined to win the honour when Hemingway comes to town. But writing is not as easy as talking about writing; the narrator tries to write poetry and tries to write stories, while feeding off involvement in the school literary magazine.
The Hemingway audience is the one he wants to win; he imagines himself as the victor. There is no way out. And no story either as he can't write one. Having practised writing by copying out Hemingway's stories, he then moves on to the final defeat. He steals one published five years earlier in another school's college magazine. It is the finest sequence in the book. Wolff's narrator reads a story in which the protagonist pursues a life of lies with which he can identify.
It is a staggering act, less for the theft itself, than for the way in which the narrator sees his life and therefore, his story, on the page before him. Having read the story, "this story where nothing was okay", he goes back to the beginning and reads it again, "slowly this time, feeling all the while as if my inmost vault had been smashed open and looted and every hidden thing spread out across these pages. From the very first sentence I was looking myself right in the face." He steals the story, passing it off as his own.
The account of the theft and the narrator's later meeting with the canny female author of the story amounts to a fine short story lurking in a book that is more intent on explaining a mood, exploring an act. Nowhere else has Wolff looked so directly at the business of writing.
Late in the narrative he writes: "The life that produces writing can't be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle towards us, killing each other on the way . . ." Observations such as this justify the reading of what is a disconcertingly disappointing book.
The problem is that Wolff writes so well, it is easy to overlook the shortcomings of a narrative that never convinces. Almost by accident, you realise this is not as good as it should be. The other problem, of course, is that he has already written marvellous storiessuch as The Barracks Thief, "Hunters in the Snow", "Firelight", "Smokers" - echoes of which are to be found in Old School - "The Poor Are Always With Us", "Mortals", "The Liar", "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" and "Coming Attractions".
So, one of the finest short story writers fails with a first novel undermined by the potential stories trapped within it. There must be a lesson in this.
