SOURCE: Taylor, Linda. “Disarmingly Armed.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4414 (6-12 November 1987): 1227.

In the following review, Taylor discusses the vulnerability and appeal of Wolff's characters in The Barracks Thief.

When the father leaves, at the beginning of this novella [The Barracks Thief], family life is devastated at a stroke. The brothers, Philip and Keith, in their early teens, are instantly divided: Keith who cries all the time (“He could not stop grieving”) is on the road to becoming a loser; Philip becomes hardened—he “learns to get along without his father, mainly by despising him”.

In 1967, with the war in Vietnam at its height, Philip, whose grades are too bad for him to get into college, on impulse joins the army. His story is about rawness, symbolized by the nettle-stung right hand of Lewis, a fellow-recruit and the archetypal boorish soldier: “It was beet red and so bloated that...