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The New Yorker: Awake
by Tobias Wolff

Image from the New Yorker's featured short story "Awake" by Tobias Wolff

I was highly impressed with Awake by Tobias Wolff all the way through the read. It catches you initially by reminding you of the days when you too had to struggle through the Odyssey. The fumbling while reading through chapters and the flash when the light bulb finally goes on. The story manages to maintain the same style as the Odyssey in that you are reading it not just for the meaning, but to “earn” your way to the good parts. The trick is that subconsciously you are enjoying it all along for the simplistic beauty of the words themselves.

The reward?

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It still has an ending, a close. A universal meaning that leaves us all to question our relationships. Why do we meet people when we do?

She was the one he should have met later, after he’d stuck his neck out and suffered some losses, after he’d really messed things up, and been fucked over, and got lost, and kept going anyway—when this little green soul of his had taken some lumps and some weather and bulked up into a man’s soul, so that he could look out of his own eyes and not feel like a kid in a mask. Then he could have come to her and strung the great bow, and laid waste to all these chickenshit doubts and wants, and claimed love as his right.

This is what we do. We stumble through life in search of the right path, the right partner. And while we fumble over each other the unexpected happens:

He hadn’t meant to ask her out. But then he did, the very next night. A week later she took him home, to this small attic room in her aunt’s house. They were just having fun, that was how he’d seen it, the two of them having some fun before going their separate ways, as people did, people their age with their whole lives still ahead of them. You didn’t want to get tied down now, when you didn’t know who you might still meet and what might open up, what chances and adventures.

You find yourself attached. Tobias Wolff’s short story awakens its readers to the fact that we can not always go into everything with a plan even if our society dictates that we should. I would venture to say that the best things come without planning.

With planning comes expectations, and with expectations…

When you plan your relationships i.e. I am going to marry a man who has a ton of money so I can then sit in my own private library and write fiction all day, you create an enormous pile of expectations hanging in a tattered net over your head. Let’s go back to my example. So you get this rich guy and maybe you even get the library, but what do you think he is expecting. Remember there is a price for everything. Do you really think you are going to teeter around your den writing once you are expected to have children, and be supermom, and please your husband at the same time… Good luck.

The greatest part of Wolff’s Awake, is the story gives us insight into the other side of the street we so rarely frequent. What about the man? We are all very aware of how the woman feels, but in general our society doesn’t want to hear a man groaning about how his wife, girlfriend, whatever… won’t sleep with him, let alone the fact that he feels inadequate and boyish.

It’s an evolutionary story

In more ways than one. The story focuses on the smallest part of the evolutionary equation, simply growing up and becoming a man, but the greater meaning is that fact that this man takes on feminine characteristics while maintaining his masculine needs. In the sum of one night he questions his entire being and where he fits into the social norm. He is aware that he has faked it and gone along with the stereotype other women put on him, but he knows this is not the reality and he is able to share this in his late night thoughts that are shared through this work with all of its readers.

It wasn’t long ago, and in fact it still stands, that men were forbidden to share their thoughts and feelings. And the time has come when man will have to rewrite their role. This story breaks the social norm and in doing so allows all of its readers to be Awake.

Enlighten yourself and read the story.

About the Reviewer
Katie Cummings has been writing and editing for several years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Southern Oregon University in 2005 with an emphasis in creative writing. She has worked as editor of the West Wind Review and actively runs a creative writing group online.

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