‘Winging It: Realism and Invention in the Stories of Tobias Wolff’

Criticism that has tried to come to terms with the outstanding short stories of Tobias Wolff (and writers associated with him) has often had recourse to variations of the contested term ‘realism’. It is argued that the term still has its usefulness, but that it should not be seen to have the simplifying resonances sometimes attributed to it. In Wolff as much as in Flaubert ‘realism’ also involves ‘invention’ and imagination, or what Wolff has called ‘winging it’. His finely crafted and subtle stories often take off into flights of poetry and imagination which question the fixed identities of realistic ‘character’ and allow for the variety of subject-positions sometimes seen as the exclusive province of non-realist writing.