Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2012): 7-26
The Sacred in the Context of the Everyday: Finding Faith in the Fiction of Tobias Wolff Anita Helmbold
Tobias Wolff has made a name for himself as a writer in the realist tradition of Raymond Carver, with whose works Wolff‘s stories are often compared. He is best known for his work in the areas of short story and memoir and probably most famous for his boyhood memoir This Boy’s Life, which was made into a 1993 feature film starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin, and Leonardo DiCaprio. A number of his short stories have now appeared in anthologies of literature designed for academic use, and his beautifully literary 2003 novel, Old School, is frequently taught in university courses. A multipleaward-winning author, he has been honored with the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Reviewers and fellow writers accord his works high praise. For example, Annie Dillard proclaims him ―a brilliant, captivating writer—one of the best we‘ve got‖ (endorsement, Wolff‘s Back in the World, n.p.), and The Boston Globe echoes the common opinion about him by proclaiming him ―one of America‘s short-story masters‖ (Eder n.p.). For all of these reasons, it seems increasingly clear that Wolff has established a reputation that is destined to last. While Wolff is well known for his crisp, incisive prose and for the penetrating qualities of his insights into the everyday struggles of our lives, he has not been widely recognized as a writer working from a standpoint that is infused with theological sensibilities and spiritual overtones. Indeed, the failure of recognition for this aspect of his work is puzzling, given that there is much to point the sensitive reader toward an awareness of this dimension of his life and work. Wolff has spoken of his faith concerns in interviews, and he speaks candidly of the necessity for faith, tempered by the humility born of doubt, in his powerful and thought-provoking essay ―Second Thoughts on Certainty: Saint Jean de Brébeuf among the Hurons.‖1 But despite Wolff‘s open acknowledgement of his Catholicism as an aspect of his identity, few critics have made the connection between his faith and his work. His memoirs acknowledge both his Jewish and Catholic backgrounds, and while a number of his characters wrestle with the question of what it means to be Jewish, it is ironic that though Wolff identifies himself openly as Catholic, and he regularly inserts Catholic characters into his fiction, the rather pervasive presence of a clearly Christian theological impulse within his writing has most often gone unnoted. Brian Hanley, for example, is more outspoken than most, characterizing Wolff‘s short story collection The Night in Question as