Free fall

What is more interesting is the argument Wolff makes. "To the extent that they are still alive to me," he writes of these stories, "I take a continuing interest in giving that life its best expression. This satisfies a certain aesthetic restlessness, but I also consider it a form of courtesy."

To the reader, he means; but you get the sense of a continuing duty not so much to the stories as to their lives, much as a mother feels obliged to nurture the baby once born. It is more than just a conceit; the special quality of Wolff's best pieces is that their endings do not close but launch them, free them to take a different direction, begin them someplace else.

Wolff is one of America's short-story masters, perhaps the closest we have to the Anglo-Irish William Trevor. His characters lack the powerfully quiet complexity of Trevor's; they require more in the way of arranged dramatic incident to instigate their breathtaking emotional progressions. (Trevor's blade can barely seem to move as it draws heart's blood.)

Any collection, even when it is a selection, will contain some weaker work. Wolff's stories are traps: some for the irony of event, others (the best, I think) for the unexpected footfalls of the spirit. All but a few are ingenious to the point where ingenuity can certainly be its own reward. The difference is that several entrap little more than mice; most snare a larger, more vital, and hotly struggling beast, while a half-dozen catch snow leopards.

Some stories touch on themes or settings in Wolff's longer works. In the beautiful "Powder," a boy's unstable father, "rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty," drives him at breakneck speed through powder snow to get him home on time to his angry mother. The scene recalls one in Wolff's first memoir, "This Boy's Life": The son, scared and indignant, begins to learn himself of the recklessness that is part of growing into a man.

"Soldier's Joy," mordant and melancholy at the same time (Wolff makes luminous syntheses out of contradictory emotions), takes up the theme of his follow-up memoir, "In Pharaoh's Army": the insanity of Army life when it is not engaged in its dreadful purpose of war - in this case the Vietnam War.