Old School

Tobias Wolff's Old School is a remarkable book. It is smart about literature and reading and what those two things mean to us when we are young. Anyone who ever loved a book or a writer will find this novel/memoir dead on right. And this is the thing that will draw people initially to this fine book. But this book offers so much more. It is also an excellent lens on a world where reading mattered. The 60's were probably the last great age of reading and writing in the US. First class writers like Frost and Hemingway were important. People felt that in order to understand what was happening in the world, they had to read the latest from Saul Bellow or Katherine Anne Porter, from Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell. Wolff captures that feeling and also the gray regret that that world of books and writers is gone, and gone forever. It is the thing that is beating ceaselessly back into the past at the end of Old School. Finally, Old School is a moving study of honesty and deception, truth and lies, and the consequences of both. I don't think anyone can finish this novel/memoir without a profound realization that often we will give up the truths that mean the most to us because we fear standing alone with those truths.

Opening this novel, I already knew by the dedication (For My Teachers) that I would love it. I was not disappointed; this book is a paean to the printed page. Reading Old School, I enjoyed total immersion in an atmosphere where love for writing resonates in the strongest, yet purest tones with the capability of transforming people. As a high school English teacher in the public schools, contemplating the idyllic atmosphere of the old boarding school makes me giddy. I am indebted to Tobias Wolff for offering me the chance to experience this world, even vicariously. This sweet, nostalgic book is a treasure, a gem. I inhaled it like nectar.

Smooth, polished, carefully enclosed - you can't find a crack in it anywhere. Wolff's first novel comes after years of writing memoirs and short stories, and you can feel the influence of both genres in this book. The writing is subtle and restrained, the narrator is a boy who wants to be a writer, and the field of action is limited mainly to one important year at the boy's private boarding school. It's a captivating combination.In an interview with Salon, Wolff mentions his love of Chekhov, saying that one of the things he appreciates about him is "his humanity, and at the same time his pitilessness." The same might be said for Wolff. His admiration of Chekhov is apparent in the clarity of his writing, in the harsh empathy he shows for a wide range of characters, and in the sudden ways those characters surprise or betray us. There's also something Chekhovian in the way Wolff selects a theme and entirely walks it through its paces, until characters are made to think and say the opposite of what they thought and said before. Still, the book belongs unmistakably to Wolff - his total recall of boyhood, his unfussy tone, his refusal to let the narrator get off easy, and his dissection of what it means to grow up. There are also many characteristic "Wolffian" moments. In Old School, the narrator's uncomfortable self-awareness recalls the opening scene of This Boy's Life, when, after witnessing a truck lose its brakes and go over a cliff, Toby guiltily takes advantage of his mother's assumption that he is upset, and manipulates her sympathy: "I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs." We feel let down by this, but immediately know we can trust him - he's telling it like it is, and there won't be any false plays for our sympathy. Wolff excels at this kind of tough unsettling and sudden double take. It's reproduced in the style of Old School, which is close to that of Wolff's short stories, clear and crisp and candid, with an ending that gives us a new angle on what's gone before, and opens the story up to a different world.

In this homage to literature, the literary life, and the power of literature to influence a reader's life, Tobias Wolff focuses his attention on a small New England prep school in 1960, a school in which students live and breathe "the writing life." The headmaster has studied with Robert Frost, and the Dean is thought to have been a friend of Ernest Hemingway during World War I. To the boys, the English Department is "a kind of chivalric order," where they practice the "ritual swordplay of their speech." For these students, the highlights of the school year are the three-times-a-year appearances of literary luminaries. When a writer visits, one boy has the opportunity to have a private audience with him, an honor for which the boys contend in vigorously competitive writing contests. The speaker/narrator, a scholarship student, is desperate to win an audience: "My aspirations were mystical," he says. "I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems." As various writers--Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and finally, everyone's idol, Ernest Hemingway--are scheduled to appear at the school, the reader observes the growth of the boys, especially the speaker, as they are influenced by and react to the contest, to each other, to the visiting writers, and to the writers' speeches. In the contest to meet Hemingway, the novel reaches its peak, and in a shocking way, the speaker's life changes forever. Wolff's novel is most remarkable for its point of view and for its conciseness. We never know what the speaker looks like or even his name, since it is through his eyes that the entire novel is filtered. He is interested in poems and short stories and philosophy and writing, all of which he talks about in detail, not in the observation of his surroundings. The limited setting of a New England prep school expands as the speaker ages and moves from school to the crueler outside world, and in later chapters, in which we see him as a mature writer, we also see how he uses some of his school experiences in his fiction, some of which appears within this novel. Old School is a novel which students of writing will treasure--for its revelations of what it means to be a writer, its insights into the thinking of a perceptive teenager who is both idealistic and pragmatic, its irony, and its remarkable narrative voice. The themes are beautifully realized, and not one word is wasted or rings false. Though Wolff says that "No true account can be given of how or why you become a writer," he comes as close here to illustrating that process as in any other novel I've ever read about the writing life. Mary Whipple