Though the writer was supposed to fact-check the obits before publication by calling the family and the funeral parlor, he had decided 'it didn't seem possible that anyone could amuse himself by concocting phony death notices and impersonating undertakers.

His editor calls him into the office to meet the subject of a recent obituary, who is alive, sitting before the metro desk. It concerns a writer who has published 'a few stories in literary journals that nobody read, including me,' and now works as a fledgling newspaper reporter, assigned obituaries and an occasional marriage announcement. The opening story, 'Mortals,' seems to be a metaphoric exploration of his return to fiction from the terrain of fact. His newest book, 'The Night in Question,' a collection of 14 stories, marks Wolff's return to out-and-out fiction, and with it, many of his more extravagant, fabular talents are again given play. And in Wolff's work one feels the slight tug of his strenuous moral tabulation. The very limitations of the form give the characterizations a frightening power. The work has a different moral leverage as well, claiming as it does to represent still-living people as they once were.

Well, here it is.' There is a kind of direct hit that would have been blunted, altered, if he had chosen to grapple with the material as fiction. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.' He continues: 'My first stepfather used to say that what I didn't know would fill a book. In the acknowledgements page of 'This Boy's Life,' Wolff qualifies a bit by saying 'this is a book of memory and memory has its own story to tell. Yet even in the memoirs, there is a tug toward invention, the slide of truth into doubt. As a result, these books have the odd, faceted shapes of life, and we wince at their hard truths. The writer can't make the story come out differently. It's amazing to read a writer so adept at the leaps and grace notes of plot dedicating himself to a form in which the writer abdicates a substantial degree of narrative control. Suffice it to say that he's much more rigorous with himself.) Within the memoirs, Wolff often does battle with himself over the nature of truth, what can be known and remembered. (Wolff seems to have two standards of judgment: one for himself and the other for the rest of us. Wolff's first three books were collections of short stories, but he is best known for the two memoirs that followed them: the quietly epic 'This Boy's Life,' and 'In Pharaoh's Army,' his Vietnam memoir, which is shocking for its humility, honesty and personal moral rigor.

Tobias wolff the night in question