The Night in Question

Tobias Wolff's third collection of short stories, The Night in Question (1996), includes fourteen pieces, which range in subject from family, to war, trauma, poverty, and the violence of everyday life. Many of the stories are darkly humorous and deeply ironic, particularly about the realities of human nature.

The collection begins with the story “Mortals,” which follows a newspaper writer. The writer writes an obituary for a local man but soon finds himself out of work when the paper goes to print and the man in question turns out to be very much alive. After being fired, the newspaper reporter finds himself in a strange situation with the man he pronounced dead.

“Firelight” is a more personal and sentimental piece about the nature of family, and what it means to find a home. The narrator is visiting rental apartments with his mother, a woman who, despite her elegance, is struggling financially. When another family shows the pair an apartment that both the mother and her son love, but cannot afford, the narrator dives into a meditation on the nature of family and home, and what it means to belong.



In “The Chain,” a man rescues his daughter from an attack by a vicious dog. Rather than being thankful he could intervene in time, the man begins to plot revenge, soon finding himself entrenched in a violent chain of events that he cannot control.

Two stories, “Casualty,” and “The Other Miller” attempt to tackle the trauma that lives beneath the surface of suburban life through the eyes of characters who fought in Vietnam. Their memories and their struggle to find themselves after their time in the service, drive the plots of these meditative stories. Both characters have to reconcile the fact that they have been permanently changed by the events of the war.

Wolff provides comedic relief in “Smorgasbord,” a story about a gang of sexually frustrated prep school boys. The boys find themselves involved in a strange plot involving a dictator's son and his seductive stepmother, the wife of a powerful and violent man. As the story progresses, the boys lose the romantic illusions of youth.



The final story, “Flyboys,” follows a trio of young friends. Unlike “Smorgasbord,” which finds comedic relief and pleasure in friendship, “Flyboys,” considers the hazards of childhood. One character is forced to develop an enormous amount of foresight and emotional control to avoid being sucked into the suffering of a struggling family, which he knows will ruin him and only cause him pain.

Ultimately, The Night in Question is a collection of stories about transformations, realizations, and the strange realities of contemporary suburban life. Wolff pairs the mundane with the absurd to create tension and to force readers to consider the state of their own plain lives.

Tobias Wolff is a fiction writer, educator, and memoirist. He was born in Alabama, attended Oxford and Stanford Universities, and taught for many years in Syracuse, New York before moving back to the Bay Area to teach at Stanford. He has written four collections of short stories, three novels, and two memoirs. He has also served as the editor for three anthologies of short fiction: Matters of Life and Death, Best American Short Stories 1994, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. He has won a Whiting Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a National Medal of the Arts, among other honors.