A WRITER'S MORAL COMPASS : WOLFF'S STORIES NEVER LACKING FOR IRONY, STYLE.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``The Night in Question: Stories''

Author: Tobias Wolff 

Data: 206 pages, Knopf; $23

Our rating: Four Stars

In ``The Life of the Body'' - the fourth of the 15 stories in Tobias Wolff's wonderful new collection, ``The Night in Question'' - the narrative says of the protagonist, Wiley, an English teacher in a private school, ``He didn't like modern fiction, its narcissism, its moral timidity, its silence in the face of great wrongs.''

Since Wiley himself is something of a narcissist, or at least a man who has trouble judging how he appears to others, one has to wonder if the remark about his literary tastes is meant to be paradoxical. Is the story making fun of Wiley, who seems to possess keen moral judgment but in confronting a crisis at the end of the story believes that ``all he really needed was words, and of words, Wiley knew, there was no end''?

The question about Wiley's esthetics echoes in the reader's head throughout this collection, Wolff's sixth book. He wrote two previous story collections, ``In the Garden of the North American Martyrs'' (1981) and ``Back in the World'' (1985); a novella, ``The Barracks Thief'' (1984); and two autobiographical works, ``This Boy's Life'' (1989) and ``In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War'' (1994). In some of the new stories, the viewpoint seems almost old-fashioned in its morality and its concern for the ``great wrongs.''

``The Chain'' describes a series of avenging acts that lead to the inadvertent killing of an innocent bystander who is best known as - oh, awful coincidence! - ``a peacemaker.''

The title story poses a veritable Lady-or-the-Tiger of a moral dilemma: a railroad switchman has to decide between lowering a drawbridge in time for a heavily loaded passenger train to cross it or leaving the drawbridge up and saving his young son, who has crawled into the lifting machinery.

But elsewhere Wolff can be morally ambiguous. ``Casualty'' appears to be setting up a situation in which Ryan, a smart-aleck soldier with only a short time to serve in Vietnam, will be killed when he provokes his new commanding officer into unfairly sending him on a series of night ambushes.

Yet Wolff changes the story's moral vector by having Ryan fatally wounded on a routine supply detail, then switches the narrative viewpoint, as if to say that in wartime, death and its effects are completely random. And the endings of several other stories shoot off on odd tangents, as if Wolff were trying to show that often enough issues of right and wrong are slippery.

Perhaps the questions raised by Wiley's literary views don't really matter. After all, what counts most about these stories is the power with which they seize your imagination. The opening of ``The Chain'' is typical: ``Brian Gold was at the top of the hill when the dog attacked. A big black wolflike animal attached to a chain, it came flying off a back porch and tore through its yard into the park, moving easily in spite of the deep snow, making for Gold's daughter. He waited for the chain to pull the dog up short; the dog kept coming.''

And here is the language, typical in its vernacular simplicity and force, with which the narrator builds up the threat to the switchman's son in the title story: ``You can imagine the kind of power that's needed to raise and lower a drawbridge, aside from the engine itself - all the winches and levers, pulleys and axles and wheels and so on. Massive machinery. Gigantic screws turning everywhere, gears with teeth like file cabinets. They've got catwalks and little crawl ways through the works for the mechanics, but nobody goes down there unless they know what they're doing.''

Still, one loose thread sticks out, which when tugged turns the stories to a slightly different light. At times, the narrator's voice merges disconcertingly with his characters', making them sound improbably literary.

``I sBtopped shooting after a while and stood there, waiting, bouncing the ball,'' reports the narrator of ``Flyboys'' about an incident in his childhood. ``The ball was overinflated and rose fast to the hand, making a hollow whang shadowed by a high ringing note that lingered in the silence.''

Of course, this faintly literary overtone may well be intentional. Storytellers appear everywhere in the collection. Often they are troublemakers, the enemies of the prevailing moral order. Two of them even risk their lives with their commentary: Ryan, the doomed soldier in ``Casualty,'' who ``narrated whatever was happening, like a sportscaster, but the narration never fit what was going on''; and Anders, a book critic in ``Bullet in the Brain'' who is caught in a bank robbery and shot in the head for laughing at a holdup man's cliches. One might even say that the most significant conflict in these stories is that between the moralists and the ironists.

The roots of this conflict are subtly exposed in ``Firelight,'' one of the collection's best stories. The narrator recalls that when he was a boy, he and his mother once moved into a rooming house in Seattle. Their hobby was ironic shopping, so to speak; that is, trying things on they knew they couldn't afford to buy.

The boy longed for the trappings of respectability. When he learned that his mother had once turned down a marriage proposal from an all-American football player from Yale, he was outraged. ``I would be rich now, and have a collie. Everything would be different.''

One chilly fall afternoon they looked at an apartment on the campus of the University of Washington. The rooms were large and comfortable, with working fireplaces, and were to be vacated by a professor critical of the university for being hollow: ``All materia, no anima,'' as he puts it.

Looking back, the narrator imagines the professor to have been a loser whose colleagues considered his high-mindedness ``a cover for lack of distinction in his field,'' whatever that may haBve been.

But at the end the narrator questions this impression. He has his own fireplace now, in a home where the winters are long and cold. When he lights it and watches ``the changing light on the faces of my family,'' he tries to feel at home, ``and I do, almost entirely.''

He concludes: ``This is the moment I dream of when I am far away; this is my dream of home. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it will somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.''

This would be the sleep of moral satisfaction, invaded by the voice of the storyteller, commenting ironically on the dream.

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Photo: (1--2) Tobias Wolff's latest short-story collecti on is ``The Night in Question.''