SOURCE: DePietro, Thomas. “Minimalists, Moralists and Manhattanites.” Hudson Review 39, no. 3 (autumn 1986): 407-08.

In the following excerpt, DePietro offers a negative assessment of Back in the World, calling the collection trendy and shallow.

Tobias Wolff, a recent PEN/Faulkner Award winner, writes the kind of short fiction that we might call, to paraphrase Carver, the what-we-talk-about-when-we-have-nothing-to-say story. His new collection, Back in the World, exemplifies the trendy “minimalist” mode with its conspicuous absence of subject matter. These stories, for all their surface detail, might well be set anywhere, and that's the point: the middle-American metaphysicians who people Wolff's tales are often loners, far from home, friendless and in search of something, though neither they nor we know what they hope to find. Time and again, his characters reach a kind of pseudo-epiphany, as in “Sister,” a vignette in which a young woman named “Marty,” an Edgar Cayce enthusiast, goes...