Almost every Tobias Wolff story has a strange, unexpected moment when everything changes. And I mean everything. Characters, conflict, setting, chronology – all of these are up for grabs. You might even think you have accidentally fallen into a different story, or placed your bookmark on the wrong page.
A Wolff tale might start out with a student running into her art professor on campus – but by the end the story has morphed into a meditation on the moral dilemmas of a soldier in the Middle East. Another Wolff offering might begin with the gripping account of a bank robbery, but strangely evolve into a recollection, from decades before, of boys arguing over the relative merits of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Or a narrative might open with a father beating off a wild dog who has tried to attack his daughter, but end up with a murder in another part of the city involving completely different people.
Wolff pulled off this stunt most outrageously in his celebrated novel Old School. Here the main character, who dominates the first 90% of the book, steps into the background in the final pages and allows another protagonist take center stage. Normally, I would see this shift in perspective as a flaw, a sign of authorial impatience or inability to control the structure of his narrative. In the case of Michael Ondaatje's recent novel Divisadero, readers encountered precisely this – several unconvincing shifts in focus that suggested a story running away from its author. But Wolff always knows exactly what he is doing, and when his books impose an unexpected change of scenery, it is usually in order to make a sly comment on everything that has gone before.
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