Back in the world of the story

AT about the same time as European readers were beginning to hail the late Raymond Carver (1939-88) as an American master, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff also emerged to play their respective roles in the shaping of a new style of American domestic realism. Although collectively tagged "Dirty Realists" by Bill Buford, Granta founding father and former editor, the trio display contrasting literary styles defying Buford's label, whatever about their shared vision. Carver's terse monologues are instantly recognisable and are very different from Ford's slower, more rhythmic musings.

Then there is Wolff. His first two collections of short stories, Hunters in the Snow (1982) and Back in the World (1985), along with the powerful novella The Barracks Thief (1984), earned him a place among the best of the new school of American writers.

Of the three, Wolff is the least easy to place; he is also the most stylistically diverse. His work is less psychologically based than that of the other two, and there is more interaction between his characters. Above all, the impact of his tough, vivid memoir, This Boy's Life (1989), and its harrowing sequel. In Pharoah's Army (1994), already recognised as an eloquent addition to America's growing Vietnam War literature has overshadowed his fiction. Wolff is the only one of this trio to have served in Vietnam and his experiences there have featured in his stories. It seemed that Wolff might have decided to concentrate on the memoir form, but The Night in Question (Bloomsbury £14.99 in UK) not only marks his return to fiction, it displays a looser, more relaxed style.

It is an uneven volume, but gathered among the 15 stories are some assured pieces. More than ever he seems to be balancing off beat humour with an eerie menace, putting his work closer to that of Saki than of any other writer of his generation.

Vietnam still features but it has become far more of a backdrop than a central motif. In "The Other Miller", a soldier is so weary of standing in the rain that when a sergeant informs him that his mother has died, the soldier knowing it is not in fact his mother, decides to participate in a personal tragedy which belongs to the other soldier in the company who has the same name. Why not? It gets him in from the rain. Having only joined the army in an attempt to stop his widowed mother remarrying, Miller hates the army, viewing it as "a completely stupid existence".

The only story which reverberates with the intensity of Wolff's Vietnam fiction takes place not on the battlefield, but in a bank. "Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway." Anders is a book critic "known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed". So incensed is Anders at the delay that he exchanges anti bank staff comments with another disgruntled customer. The mood changes with the arrival of bank raiders. Anger turns to fear, yet even now Anders cannot control his sarcasm.

A terrified father watches as a dog, tethered on a generous length of chain, lunges at his little girl and fixes its teeth into her shoulder. "He saw the tensed hindquarters and the flattened ears and the red gleam of gum under the wrinkled snout. Anna was on her back, her face bleached and blank, staring at the sky." The dog releases its hold only after the father "took the [dog's] ear between his teeth and bit dawn with everything he had". Later he recalls the horror of an episode which only lasted about a minute and resents the attitude of the police. "They said that since the dog was chained up, no law was broken." His cousin listens and decides, "By that logic, he could be on a chain ten miles long and legally chew up the whole fucking town." The outraged parent knows he can rely on his cousin, an individual with "an exacting, irritable sense of justice, and a ready store of loyal outrage." Both men plot a simple revenge which develops into tragedy.

Narrative has a more freely moving structure throughout these stories than Wolff has previously exercised. His prose is sharper, more exact. So is his humour.

"Two Boys and A Girl" follows one youth's attempts to steal his pal's dim but pretty girlfriend. Entrusted with her protection when Rafe goes fishing in Canada with his father, Gilbert sees being asked to take care of Mary Ann "as what the hero of a war movie says to his drab sidekick before leaving an a big mission". Preparing for the seduction, Gilbert sits in a diner eating apple pie and watching the traffic. "To an ordinary person driving by he supposed he must look pretty tragic, sitting here alone over a coffee cup, cigarette smoke curling past his face. And the strange thing was, that person would he right. He was about to betray his best friend." Gilbert even offers to paint her father's fence. When it becomes clear he is not going to have his way, the suitor rebels. Most of the sexual frustration in this book is treated comically.

Wolff's comic voice is at its most disarming in a story in which the narrator recalls being hauled in by his newspaper editor to meet a man whose obituary he had published that morning. It has the feel of memory about it as he remembers thinking, "someday I'd move to the police beat. Things would get better." Except he got fired.

Narrative voice is equally strong in two other stories in which sons remember parents. In the finest story, "Firelight", Wolff appears to be revisiting the mother/son relationship of This Boy's Lee. It is a gentle, funny and ultimately moving variation of that story and contains not only some of the best dialogue he has written but also several of the funniest asides. This story is worth reading for ease of narrative alone. Informed by his mother that she once rejected an All American Yale football star, the narrator is outraged: "I would be rich now, and have a collie. Every thing would be different."

By no means a classic, this is nevertheless a likeable, engaging collection from a fine writer move ing in new directions.