by Tobias Wolfe.

Knopf. 379 pages. $26.95.

By Beth Taylor
Special to the Journal

Tobias Wolff is best known for This Boy’s Life, a memoir that defined the genre and spawned a gritty movie of a boy surviving a life with an abusive stepfather. Each scene was masterfully wrapped around seemingly true dialogue. The boy’s protective relationship with a stoic mother, his vulnerable but determined wit and perseverance, made Wolff’s story wise and freshly poignant at the same time.

It’s a combination that marks most of his six books — collections of short stories; Old School, a novel about a boy on scholarship in prep school; and In Pharoah’s Army, a memoir of being bored and disengaged during his stint in Vietnam.

His story collections placed Wolff in the literary company of writers like Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. Like their characters, Wolff’s live in the country of arduous life, defined by limited funds, isolation, an abusive past or present, or a life gone stale. In brief, morally complicated profiles and moments of choice or paralysis, Wolff makes his characters suddenly face their withering reality. Or, in a moment of violence, they suddenly realize the poverty and blessing of their life at once.

A lot of these stories deal with lying and betrayal. “In the Garden of North American Martyrs” builds in intensity as a candidate for a professorship slowly realizes she is being interviewed at a college only as a token gesture, and she takes her revenge in the lecture she must give. In “Hunters in the Snow,” buddies turn on each other when they’re too incompetent to find animals as prey. In “Bullet in the Brain,” an arrogant literary critic gets his fatal comeuppance when he mocks a robber’s word choice during a bank hold-up.

Sometimes, in the delusion and deception a kind of grace is born. In “The Liar,” a worried mother sends her compulsive liar of a son to the family doctor, to no effect. But as the young man holds fellow bus passengers in thrall with a tall tale, he realizes there is something almost “holy” in the words of his imagination. In “Powder,” a father drives confidently but blindly in a snowstorm, and the son realizes that even though his father is a blustering con man, the con itself is endearing.

The strongest and funniest stories have a young protagonist, bumping through first sexual experiences, negotiating unreasonable or sad adults, facing baffling occasions with bewildered acceptance and ambivalence. In one of the best new stories, “Down to the Bone,” an adult version of that boy tries in vain to manage his mother’s death as if it’s just another day of business.

Two of the newer stories here seem clumsier, more contrived: In “A White Bible,” a Muslim immigrant kidnaps his son’s teacher to force a better grade for the cheating boy; in “A Mature Student,” a veteran returning to college tries to find common ground with a professor who was a student protester in 1968 Prague. They don’t read true.

But most often these stories remind us that Tobias Wolff is a master of the short story. In the best of those collected here, Wolff renders a time and place as seen through the eyes of a young or older man used to stumbling into imbroglios, scraping by, coming up for air. The tone is always a refreshing blend of humility and scorn for the protagonist’s own blindness and amorality, tinged with a bit of generosity for the fools we mortals be. OUR STORY BEGINS: New and Selected Stories,