Tobias Wolff Our Story Begins.
Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95
Deep in the climate-controlled recesses of the Stanford University library is a book so rare that not a single Ivy League school has a copy. “Felton Collection,” says the card catalogue, followed by a vaguely threatening word: “Non-circulating.” It’s nothing too scandalous—just Ugly Rumours, a novel by Tobias Wolff published once in Britain, in 1975, and then disowned for all time. It’s never been listed under ALSO BY TOBIAS WOLFF, and it never will be.
I live at Stanford, like the book and its author, so I’ve had ample opportunity to peek into the foxed, brittle, and probably embarrassing juvenilia of a literary giant. But I don’t need to peek. I’m just glad it’s there, proof that it isn’t necessary to write a masterpiece on the first try, that literature favors experience and patience more than youth and hype. Indeed, Wolff’s work is never done; as he writes in the introduction to Our Story Begins, “I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts… . If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented?”
From this we learn that Wolff writes primarily for his audience and not for his own gratification or therapy. This is no small point, because Wolff is particularly famous as a memoirist. This Boy’s Life(1989), the faultless tale of his
