Eugene is obviously an unusual child, and is prone to drawing attention to himself due to his dress sense, facial expression, and his clumsiness.
Wolff is very good at characterisation even with brief descriptions, for example in The Chain:
“He yelled at the driver, a black man wearing sunglasses and a knit cap. The driver ignored him. He looked straight ahead and drove across the lot into the road, but not before Rourke got a good look at his license plate. It was a vanity tag, easy to remember-SCUSE ME.” The driver seems to be an arrogant, rich and rude man.
In Hunters in the Snow, I do not think the characterisation is as good as the previous two stories. I learned through the story, that Tub was the ‘reject’ of the group and was poked fun of because he was portrayed as a fat, thick, stereotypical American.
Tobias Wolff’s power to shock also impressed me a lot. The opening of The Chain is extremely dramatic and tense, especially when the dog bites Anna:
“He screamed one last time as the dog made his lunge, and at that moment Anna flinched away and the dog caught her shoulder instead of her face. Gold was barely halfway down the hill, arms pumping, feet sliding in his boots. He seemed to be running in place, held at a fixed, unbridgeable distance as the dog dragged Anna backwards off the sled, shaking her like a doll.”
The phrase “running in place” emphasises Gold’s helplessness, and how he had to watch his daughter suffer attack from the savage, wild dog.
Another good example of this is in Hunters in the snow:
“Kenny turned to Tub, ‘I hate you.’
Tub shot from the waist. Kenny jerked backwards against the fence and buckled to his knees. He folded his hands across his stomach. ‘Look,’ he said. His hands were covered in blood. In the dusk his blood was more blue than red. It seemed to belong to the shadows. It didn’t seem out of place. Kenny eased himself onto his back. He sighed several times, deeply. ‘You shot me,’ he said.”
This part of the story is very shocking, as part of you thinks Kenny is just joking; yet part of you agrees with Tub, and assumes that he seriously wants to kill him.
Another first-class ingredient of Wolff’s writing is his description. I am impressed by his use of metaphors and other descriptive techniques, for example in The Chain:
“Gold had raised the hood of her parka against the needling gusts, and he knew that she could not hear him or see the dog racing toward her. He was conscious of the dog’s speed and of his own dreamy progress, the weight of his gumboots, the clinging trap of crust beneath the new snow.”
I like how Wolff describes the wind as ‘needling gusts’, as this makes the wind seem so cold that it can pierce Anna’s skin. I am also very fond of the way the pace slows ever more in the build-up to the dog’s attack.
Exceptional descriptive writing is also present in Hunters in the Snow: “He was jackknifed over the tailgate, his head hanging over the bumper.”
The word ‘jackknifed’ means that he is bent over at the waist, like a folded jackknife.
Out of these three books, my favorite one is The Chain, because it excels at every point I have written about in this essay, and has the best plot.
