Book Smart vs. Street Smart
In "The Night in Question" by Tobias Wolff, the difference between "book smart" and "life smart" are evident. Book smart people have little common sense; they are often vain and live their lives as if they were fiction. They can be pedantic and put too much faith in words. Book smart means you may be able to understand and derive pleasure from words, but you might not do so well with real people, in real life situations. Life smart people are just the opposite. In one word, they are savvy. They have common sense, they understand things quickly, and they know how to choose their friends. Life smart people know when to keep quiet, and understand the boundaries of behavior. Book smart people may function well in academic and research environments, but they do not do well in real life situations, and they do not understand people nearly as well as they understand words. Life smart people may not be academically brilliant, but they know how to get along in life, and they may actually be more successful than book smart people, because they are politically aware, and they understand situations and people much better than those who are book smart do.
Wiley and Anders are intellectuals - they are book smart, but they know little about life or about people. Wiley spends his time drinking wine and reading nineteenth century novels, and wonders why he has bad luck with women. That is book smart. Wiley has vanity, too much faith in words, he is pedantic, and he does not think his actions through. He shows self-rectitude in the story, along with braggadocio and moral relativity. In short, someone who was life smart would not have gotten himself into a situation where he was beaten up over a strange woman. Anders is the same way. He can "savagely" attack a book, but he is clueless when it comes to bank robbers and their violence. He is seduced by his own, he is vain, and he cannot listen, besides being supercilious and disparaging. He gets a bullet to the brain because of it, and anyone who was life smart would have known when to shut up.
References
Wolff, Tobias. The Night in Question. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
