SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “What You'd Call a Good Man?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4786 (23 December 1994): 22.

In the following review, Wood offers a mixed assessment of In Pharaoh's Army, complimenting Wolff's style and skill but questioning the tone of the memoir.

At the end of Tobias Wolff's short novel, The Barracks Thief, the narrator looks back on his life and sees in his army service an emblematic moment, a place where three once-raw recruits came to represent radically different destinies. One became a thief, another a deserter, while the narrator became “a conscientious man, a responsible man, maybe even what you'd call a good man—I hope so”. Disavowals haunt this wary self-congratulation. “But I'm also a careful man, addicted to comfort, with an eye for the safe course.” He won't ever bother his neighbours, “or expect them to be my friends”.

What we'd call a good man looks like...